Indonesian Film Festival takes a risk in Australia

Dewi Anggraeni, Contributor, Melbourne, Australia

The organizers of Indonesian Film Festival (IFFEST) 2002 took a leap into the dark when they decided to stage their festival in Melbourne, Australia. At first glance the risk seemed two-fold. The festival might fail to attract local interest, Melbourne having enough high-caliber international films showing all year round. And even if it did attract a substantial audience, it might be regarded as just another bunch of exotic films.

The first few days have proven that the calculated risk taken by the organizers is paying off. Though not getting full-houses (not many films showing in Australian cities do), those who come are definitely aficionados.

Since the festival has been well publicized in teaching institutions, apart from traditional cinema-goers looking for something different, many students and teachers of Indonesian studies have come from country towns in Victoria specially for the events.

The seven participating cinemas are burgeoning with movie- goers, Indonesian and Australian alike, who speak Indonesian with various degrees of vernacular thrown in. There was a warm ambience of community feeling inside the cinemas.

Ca Bau Kan, director Nia Dinata's debut, based on Remy Sylado's novel of the same title was the opening film of the festival on Tuesday at the Hoover Cinema in the heart of the city. It was generally well-received, and the audience happily expressed various sentiments and opinions about the film.

The period aspect of the film sat well with them, since Melbourne film-lovers are used to historical films. However some viewers commented that Ca Bau Kan came across more as a television film than a cinema film, because more scenes were filmed inside.

"It lacks the grandness of a cinema film," one of them said.

The cultural background of the story may also have interfered with the general appreciation of the film. The main woman character, according to some viewers, did not come out well as a whole person. She was two-dimensional. The viewers did not get to know her. We see here a problem of a story from a male point of view, set in an era where women, especially kept women and prostitutes, were not expected to be socially prominent.

The local Indonesian audience loved the film. They commented on the attention to detail, and the older among them confessed to feeling nostalgic.

On show, apart from full-length feature films, are also short films made by Indonesian students living in Australia, and various documentary films.

Australia has a long tradition of documentary film-making, so this genre also attracts a substantial audience, especially fellow cineasts and film-makers.

Two political documentary films shown on the second night, Mass Grave, Digging up the Cruelties of Indonesian Barbarism and The Army forces them to be Violent, were followed by a discussion forum.

The two films were awareness-raising for those who knew very little about Indonesia and thought-provoking for viewers who already had some degrees of familiarity with the political situation in Indonesia.

More interesting perhaps, was the background account of Tino Saroengallo, the maker of The Army forces them to be Violent, a film record of the mass protests in May 1998 when a number of students from Trisakti University were shot dead, and an even greater number were injured.

While making the documentary, Tino combined his animal instincts and filmmaker's astuteness, and delivered an end- product which was astounding in the extent of its coverage, hence an incredible chronicle of the time.

Tino conceded that many of his critics complained of the fact that he only followed one protest group. "I was alone, with no significant funding in order to send cameramen around to cover different groups. I wanted to make a film about the mass protests. What should I do?" he recounted. So he followed one group, Forkot. Looking back now, he knows he made the right decision, because the scenes he was able to shoot and the impromptu interviews he did were extremely revealing and historically important.

Once he made the decision, he followed it through with tenacity, though several times when the going was really tough and along with the protesters he was in danger of being physically harmed, or worse still, fatally wounded, he momentarily wondered what he was doing there.

When he finally obtained funding to make the film into a 35 mm format, he "let the film assume its own life". When shown in cinemas in Indonesia, The Army forces them to be Violent failed to interest the masses, yet the copies were snapped up by friends and acquaintances, and Tino never worried about financial compensation. These copies were then taken or sent to many different countries, and even copied further.

Had he been more proprietorial and commercially minded about the film, Tino might have lost it completely. A television channel that claimed to have complete footage of the protests, Tino told the audience, was raided and subsequently lost it all. "At least I knew that even if I lost my master copy, there are copies all over the world which the authorities will never be able to eliminate altogether," he said.

The festival continues until Oct. 6, with 10 full-length feature films, a number of short films, some student-produced feature films, as well as documentary films, many with political content.

At the end of the festival, there will be a discussion forum at the University of Melbourne, titled Indonesian Film: A new Wave in Contemporary Asian Culture, and an announcement of the winners of the competition for student-produced films.

A heartening sign of the maturing of Indonesia is, despite the fact that the political content of some of the documentary films in the festival is unflattering to the authorities, the Consulate General here extended its hospitality by organizing a dinner party for the organizers and their entourage.