Looking to the future to tell the story of the past

By Jane Freebury

JAKARTA (JP): A look at Indonesia's celebrated mix of cultures is available on all television stations simultaneously every Sunday morning through the program Anak Seribu Pulau. The producers Garin Nugroho and Mira Lesmana (Miles Productions) hatched the idea in response to being commissioned to produce a documentary to celebrate 50 years of independence in Indonesia last year.

A joint committee of all the television stations, each of which took responsibility for handling particular aspects -- marketing was to be handled by Indosiar, sales by SCTV, and production was in the hands of RCTI. But the idea to "say" it with children came from Mira and Garin. Children from around the archipelago tell their stories in Anak Seribu Pulau, a handsome 14-episode Indonesian television series.

Mira and Garin felt that they could best take a retrospective view of the nation by looking to the future; the next generation. Children represent the future, and so it was felt that they would bring the series into focus.

Intriguing locations around Indonesia were considered first. The filmmakers then sought out the children who would carry the narrative.

Mira puts it like this: "We said 'let's pick Aceh', 'let's try Lampung', and that's how it started. There was bound to be an appropriate kid who was living in that environment -- maybe a member of a family attached to a mosque, maybe a child learning to be an elephant trainer. Our writers developed synopses, which were basically fictive, and then our research team went out to find a family with a kid between seven and 14 years of age, to match it." The children then told their story, "like a dairy entry".

It's hard to imagine opposition in any kampong to such a project.

"It all went very well. The kids were open, relaxed, the families and kampongs were supportive," Mira Lesmana said.

The filmmaker does not know whether they were lucky or whether there were so many things to tell that "wanted to be told". With so much still untold, why stop at 13, why stop at a thousand?

Far and wide

The "diary entries" in Anak Seribu Pulau come from far and wide, the length and breadth of Indonesia. They come to the screen from Aceh, Solo, Central Kalimantan, Indramayu, Maluku, East Timor, Bali, Padang, Lombok, Jakarta and Toraja. The series opens and closes with the two works under the direction of Garin Nugroho. The first episode is located in Merauke and the 13th, the penultimate, is located in Lampung and tells the story of a young boy who is learning to be an elephant trainer. The final episode, No. 14 on July 21, will screen as an omnibus compilation from the series.

If you have been watching Anak Seribu Pulau since the beginning, you will already have been introduced to Hendrik B. Laongso at his home in Merauke, to Si Calus of Indramayu, and to Kabri Wali of Aceh. And you will meet many others as the series makes its way in crisscross fashion back and forth across the archipelago. Each episode is a discrete entity -- and a world apart.

Far from the urban realities of video games, television and traffic that shape the imagination of the three young children whose story is set in Jakarta, Hendrik B. of Irian Jaya and his friends spend long hours acquiring hunting skills in the tracts of swamp land beyond their home. They have a particularly engrossing problem that relates directly to survival -- how to catch a kangaroo.

Crouched on all fours, with bow and arrow at the ready, the apprentice hunter moves in on the intended prey, while simulating the rhythms of the sounds produced by one long heavy tail and two very long feet. "Thump -- thump, thump" he goes with his hands on the ground. The camera of Garin Nugroho is right down there at ground level with him. Then a high-angle shot suggests the kangaroo's perspective with a glance down at the wiry brown body in bright red shorts, crawling towards it. A few more twitches of the ears, it turns tail and pounds off. For the boys, another quarry will have to do and they close in on a chubby kuskus.

This and other hunting sequences set in the wilderness of Indonesia are arresting viewing.

There is a deer hunt in this week's episode on Maluku. At first it seems the quarry is a wild pig, but that animal gets away. A hand-held camera follows fleet-footed hunters, including young Hatu Leipari, as they scramble through the undergrowth. Memories of the hunt are retold later in Hatu's story in monochrome flashback. With location sequences against a soundscape of heightened ambient sound, the still power of the mountain wilderness of Maluku is allowed to develop a presence of its own. This willingness on the part of the filmmakers to let the environment "speak", rather than having it gagged with an overlay of light music, is much more compelling.

The filmmakers learned about the initiation ceremony of Maluku, but it hadn't been performed for five years. It was staged again for the film. A rare event, the ceremony was recorded with the many children who had not yet been initiated actually undergoing the ceremony in episode six of the series.

This illustrates the point that of the thousand and one stories out there, some are already slipping from sight. The moving image can record and document this slippage of passing custom and tradition. While Anak Seribu Pulau is not an ethnographic film it performs a significant function by bringing Indonesia's still living cultural traditions to the foreground.

Another remarkable story in the series is that of Kabri Wali, a young boy of Aceh with an amazing singing voice (episode two). Against the vital staccato rhythms of Aceh music and dance patterns, the clear voice of Kabri Wali rises like a prayer.

Nan T. Achnas directed this episode, which allowed more for the intrusion of certain social facts reflected in the images of houses with satellite dishes, of children using a public telephone, and the use of an automobile in a rural community. Technology and social change seemed to intrude rarely in other episodes which lean instead towards the exotic -- not unlike travelogues. Episode two balanced a wistful nostalgia for childhood with images of modernization. It wasn't grim, it was just oblique, with the freshness of a child's perspective retained.

The interwoven stories of three children represent Jakarta in episode 11. Putri Dwima Saroyo, Danarto, and Sumi Bokir portray the very different aspects of life in Jakarta, with its juxtaposition of the old beside the new. Building construction and traffic jams, facts of daily life in the city, are highly visible.

The three-in-one rule presents the opportunity for a child from a car-owning family to meet with a child from a family that has no car. An opportunity for a child who is learning life skills in front of the computer screen to meet with a child who is learning life skills on the street. Friendship follows and, with the help of new friends, Putri adds Betawi traditional dance to her other accomplishments -- classical piano, classical ballet, and roller-blading. And, she graduates from simulation to real experience, from a roller-coaster ride on the video game screen at the beginning of her story to a real-life roller coaster ride with her new friend.

Putri is one of only three female subjects in Anak Seribu Pulau. The other two are Eny Yusopa from Desa Pilang, near Solo, and Ida Ayu Diah, from Desa Bongkasa, in Bali. Eny is learning batik tulis, and Ida is learning traditional dance. "We originally wanted to show six girls and six boys. But the research teams always came up with boys and we didn't want to push it," Mira explains.

For the producers of such a sweeping series, the potential for headaches was considerable, with so many stories from which to select and so many ways in which to tell them. The choice of a child's point-of-view for each episode of Anak Seribu Pulau is, quite simply, inspired -- and it's canny too.

Children in the preteen or early teen years make wonderful film subjects. They are endearing. Indonesia seen through the eyes of a child offers the filmmaker safe passage through the minefield of challenges to representational authenticity and accuracy. The authoritative narrative voice-over gives way to the voices of children. It is non-contentious.

Fact and fiction

The producers say frankly they set out to portray an optimistic vision and that they were not looking to touch on social problems. They wanted a program that said "Hey, look at these people. They are not rich but they are happy." It was their stated intention to portray an optimistic vision of a people living a harmonious existence, with dignity.

Anak Seribu Pulau is a mix of fact and fiction. "We call it docudrama." In Anak Seribu Pulau scenes of authenticity are represented within the framework of a narrative, which is by definition selectively organized, with the good bits left in and the boring bits left out. Of course this is basic to filmmaking -- who is going to watch two hours of unmediated footage of a traffic jam? It has to be turned into a story. Like Jacques Tati's classic 1972 film Traffic.

Documentaries have long struggled for an audience and now some commentators are crying out for even more biased and exuberant documentaries. They are telling documentary makers to forget balance and authenticity in order to save the genre.

There is a pretty potent argument that all successful documentary film borrows from the strategies of fiction film, using its grammar: the single character with whom to identify, the big close-ups which intensify the emotional climate and bring about greater audience identification with a character, the reverse angle shots and the camera movements that create a mood of anticipation in the audience. Not to mention the use of music and sound to evoke feeling and to intensify mood. Anak Seribu Pulau definitely belongs to the genre of docudrama, it is not pure documentary.

This being said, the scope of the Anak Seribu Pulau series, with its patchwork of lifestyles around the archipelago, is an important document of social history. It was clearly conceived as such, and was made on celluloid, rather than tape, a rare event in television production here. Mira Lesmana sees the series as breaking ground in several ways, including its handsome production values. High resolution images make it a better quality product for sales abroad. Also it can be touched up years later, and it lasts longer than videotape.

The series has used the skills of some among the best of Indonesia's young contemporary directors: Garin Nugroho, Arturo GP, Nan T Achnas, Moh Rivai Riza, Enison Sinaro, Srikaton M, and Noto Bagaskoro. Award-winning documentary maker Nan T. Achnas is the only female director.

All film crews were entirely Indonesian, with the exception of those who shot the episodes in Bali and Maluku. Here two American filmmakers, Gary Hayes and Robert Chappell of Katena Films, were each involved. They were in charge of both cinematography and the direction of each of their respective episodes. The producers considered it important to involve some foreigners as the program was intended for export. They were brought in to contribute their particular vision of Indonesia, which Mira thinks turns out to be, "surprisingly enough, the same thing".

Maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but that's not important anyway. What matters is that Anak Seribu Pulau is good television.