Indonesian punks star in Canadian documentary
M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
If local bands or performers have found it hard to make it big beyond the country's music scene, Balinese punk band Superman Is Dead (SID) have made their international debut in a rather simple, yet unusual way: being featured in a documentary film.
The Kuta-based band is the subject of an 87-minute documentary film, The Punks Are Alright: A Punk Rock Safari From the First World to The Third, together with two bands of the same genre from Hamilton, Canada and Sao Paolo, Brazil.
The film delves into the unifying power of music and how it gives voice to a new generation of young people who long for a better world than the one in which they live.
The documentary film, produced and directed by Canadian director Douglas Crawford, tells the story of a cult punk band from Canada, the Forgotten Angels, a seminal act that inspired the formation of the Blind Pigs, an aspiring punk band from Sao Paolo.
The film then travels to Indonesia to meet Dolly, a 23-year old poor Jakartan, who fell in love with the Blind Pigs.
Dolly was too poor to obtain a copy of the Blind Pigs CD and asked the band to give him free copies via the Internet.
In the country, the filmmaker also meets Jerinx, a drummer of SID who tries to make sense of the situation in the tourist island, where prostitution is rife and terrorism is the new danger.
Jerinx sees his Balinese folks are caught between surviving to make ends meet and being enslaved to the West in the tourism industry.
The mohawked Jerinx is a member of SID, a band that stands as one of the country's most popular punk outfits that managed to make their way out of obscurity, without having to abandon their do-it-yourself ethics or artistic principles.
The band released their first album for major label Sony Music, Kuta Rock City, in 2003, which sold thousands of copies. Earlier, the band released four EPs on indie labels.
SID is also featured in the film in concerts, in between interviews and footage of other bands in performance.
Crawford said that the documentary films started as a short film about the Forgotten Angels (whose individual band members are now almost in their fifties), before he learned that there were kids in Brazil who were passionate about the Canadian band and an Indonesian kid who was inspired by the band.
"There is a common thread from the Forgotten Rebels to the Blind Pigs of Brazil to Dolly in Indonesia ... There are people whose lives has been totally changed by punk," Crawford told The Jakarta Post.
The Punks Are Alright will be premiered at JiFFest on Dec. 12 and rescreened on Dec. 17.