More films and longer time at the third Jakarta Film Festival

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The third Jakarta Film Festival promises to be better than ever

================= Hera Diani The Jakarta Post Jakarta -----------------

Following the well attended event last year, the third Jakarta International Film Festival (JIFFest) starts on Friday night and continues for the next 16 days with the screening of over 100 quality films from around 30 countries.

The films will be screened at Pusat Perfilman Usmar Ismail (PPHUI) and Erasmus Huis on Jl. H.R. Rasuna Said, South Jakarta; Djakarta Theater on Jl. M.H. Thamrin, TIM 21 movie theater and the Jakarta Arts Institute at the Ismail Marzuki arts center on Jl. Cikini Raya and New Goethe Institute on Jl. Matraman -- all in Central Jakarta.

Portuguese film Me You Them (Eu To Eles) by director Andrucha Waddington, a film which was selected at last year's Cannes Film Festival, will kick off the festival at PPHUI for invited guests on Friday night, Oct. 26.

Last year's event was held for 10 days with some 100 films from nine countries.

The annual festival has always been a huge success with film buffs flocking to the venues, some of them willing to sit on plastic chairs or even on the floor when the tickets were sold out.

There has always been a main theme for each festival. This year's theme is Indonesia's Identity Seen Through Film.

Shanty Harmayn, the festival's cofounder said the theme was chosen due to the great response from the audience to the Indonesian films screened last year.

"We had a section for Indonesian film last year, and the response was great. So, we decided to further explore the section," she told a media conference here recently.

There will be 28 Indonesian films screened at the festival, portraying the country from the 1930s to the present.

"As usual, JIFFest has always been a platform for new Indonesian cinema. So, this year, we will also present new Indonesian films," Shanty said.

The new Indonesian films include Jelangkung (Indonesian teenage horror flick) which is currently being shown in theaters in the capital; Pasir Berbisik (Whispering Sand), Jakarta Project and Tragedy, which have all been shown recently; and Beth, Hallo Kang Mamat and Viva Indonesia. The latter is directed by five directors, and tells stories about five Indonesian children from a number of troubled regions in Indonesia.

Old Indonesian films like Max Havelaar and Serangan Fajar (Dawn Attack) will also be screened, as well as documentary and short films like High Noon In Jakarta, a documentary piece about former president Abdurrahman Wahid.

Other sections in the film festival include World Cinema, Youth Films, Animation, Human Rights, At the Crossroads of Two Cultures, Changes In Society, Indonesian Masters of Documentary Film, New Asian Cinema, Double Identities, Focus on Jafar Panahi, New Korean Cinema, Espace Francophone, Digital Film, New Swedish Cinema, New Chinese Cinema, U.S. Independents, Shorts, and Retrospectives on directors: Kenci Mizoguchi, Ingmar Bergman and Hou Hsiao Hsien.

As usual, many of the films being screened have already garnered awards in several festivals, like Dancer In The Dark (Cannes 2000), Traffic (Academy Award 2001) and many more.

This year's event also marks the first competitive year with the Asian Short Film Competition -- with 12 finalists coming from Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and Turkey, and the New Indonesian Digital Cinema Competition with all of the new films mentioned above except Pasir Berbisik.

Foreign directors, producers, distributors and actors whose films are being screened during JIFFest will attend the event.

They are Iranian Jafar Panahi with The Circle which won the Golden Lion Prize at last year's Venice Film Festival, London- born Kim Longinotto (Divorce Iranian Style), Carmela Baronowska (Scenes from an Occupation) and Sophie Barry (Viva Timor Loro Sae) from Australia, French Laurent Becue-Renard (Living Afterwards: Words of Women), Brazilian Fernando Meirelles (Domesticas), Italian Fabrizio Mosca (I Cento Passi), actress Fatemeh Pakkho from Sweden's Before The Storm, French director Philippe Martin, French distributor Michel Saint Jean, and Krishna Sen from Australia.

Those filmmakers will be present at the screening of their films as well as on the panel discussions during JIFFest.

This year's JIFFest will also present some fringe activities: with seminars on Deconstructing Propaganda Films, Women's Rights and Islam, Indonesian Through Foreign Lenses, Film Law and New German Cinema; a Digital Workshop and Distribution Workshop organized by French Embassy and IKJ; a Visual Literacy Screenings program with PopCorner; a program for teenagers called Seeing Movies Is Reading About Them; and a documentary film screening House of Docs.

If you attended the festival last year, you would remember how chaotic the ticketing system was.

Shanty apologized for the ticketing problem, saying that this year they would simplify it. "We wanted everything to be computerized but it turned out the computer broke down. So, this year, the whole thing will be manual," she said.

Shanty also said the festival would have an additional screening for almost every film. "We won't provide extra chairs or allow people to sit on the floor. We want everyone to have their own seat."

Tickets are being sold at Rp 10,000 per movie, and can be obtained at Jl. Sutan Syahrir 1 C Blok 3-4, Central Jakarta. A limited number of tickets, 20 percent of them, are also available at the film venues every day.

For more information, you can visit www.jiffest.com or call (021) 325-113 or 325-115 for film schedules.