JP/19/KIDS

JP/19/KIDS

Street kids document their own lives on film

Slamet Susanto
The Jakarta Post/Yogyakarta

The lives of street urchins inspired Garin Nugroho to make Leaf
on a Pillow, a film that is quite popular in Japan.

In the film, Garin depicts graphically how street children at
Tugu station, Yogyakarta, became acquainted with sex and sniffed
glue to get high.

Also, inspired by street urchins' lives, a TV station has
produced a film titled Rumah Kardus (Cardboard House).

Although many discussions and seminars have been held about
the lives of street children, these unfortunate individuals have
little, if any, opportunity to speak about their own tough lives,
let alone document them in audiovisual form.

Luckily, two non-governmental organizations (NGOs) engaged in
assisting street children and providing advocacy on their behalf
have created an opportunity for some of them to make a
documentary about their lives and aspirations.

Recently, five teenagers living in Tegalpanggung-Cokrodirjam
village on the banks of the River Code -- Wahyu, 14, Tiok, 12,
Fredy, 16, Melia, 16, and Denis, 13, were given a rare
opportunity to make a documentary about their daily lives.

Every day, they have to line up before they can take a bath at
a communal bathroom. They play football or badminton in very
narrow alleys. Still, these children are not devoid of
aspirations.

Wahyu and Tiok, for example, would like to be badminton
players, Denis aspires to be a doctor, while Melia dreams of
being a career woman when she grows up.

Before making the documentary, the teenagers first put their
ideas on a storyboard.

"We made the story as a documentary, based on our own lives,"
said Wahyu, who was entrusted to direct the filmmaking.

Besides Wahyu and his friends, children from two other
villages, Pajeksan (Yogyakarta) and Wadas (Sleman) also made
their own films.

The Pajeksan group describe the cruelty of street life in
Malioboro, downtown Yogyakarta, while their counterparts from
Wadas tell a story about their lives on the street at Condong
Catur intersection (north of Yogyakarta city center).

To encourage the children to record their experiences in
documentary form, two NGOs sponsoring the scheme, the Institute
for Development and Economic Analysis (Idea) and Etnoreplika,
organized a workshop in Kaliurang, Sleman, last April.

There, the children were taught technical aspects of how to
make a film, use a camera and shoot scenes.

Conceptually, independent filmmaking implies power-sharing,
said Budi Satriawan, the director of Etnoreplika. As is generally
known, videorecording is a process affordable only to those who
are educated and have money.

Street children are usually turned into objects and can never
speak about themselves. "We are only facilitators. Our concept is
to share power with these marginalized kids," Budi said.

What Etnoreplika had done, Budi said, was confined only to
providing knowledge about filmmaking, such as how to use a camera
and composition.

His organization, he added, also assisted the children in
editing the film. "We hope the film will be completed in mid-
August and then it will be screened for the public," he said.

The goal, Budi said, of helping the children to make a
documentary about their own lives was to sensitize them to social
and environmental problems in their surroundings. If, some day
they were confronted with a problem, they would be more sensitive
to it, analyze it and seek a solution.

When the film was shot over two days recently, Wahyu and his
four buddies had to absent themselves from school.

The scene opened with the children playing football in the
late afternoon. The next day, the shooting continued with a scene
of the children queuing in front of a public bathroom before
going to school. The scene had to be reshot several times,
though.

"Camera ready," said Fredy and then Wahyu, the director,
shouted, "Action!" Straight away, children chased a football.
Suddenly, Wahyu shouted again in his strong Javanese accent,
"Stop, Repeat!"

The opening scene was shot five times. Fredy had forgotten to
depress the record button of the camera.

"Sorry, I've never used a camera before; I was taught how to
use it but was too nervous," he added, sheepishly.