Parents Urged to Enforce Discipline in Monitoring Film Age Ratings During Eid Holiday
The Indonesian Film Censorship Board (LSF) has urged the public to be more selective in choosing age-appropriate content when taking children to cinemas, particularly during the Eid holiday period.
Choosing inappropriate films is considered to have potentially harmful long-term impacts on children’s mental and cognitive development. LSF Vice Chair Noorca M Massardi stressed that viewing content that does not match age classification ratings poses a genuine threat to children’s growth and development, highlighting how adult content can disturb their developing psyche.
“If films with 17+ ratings are watched by underage children, it will definitely produce negative effects. This does not align with their cognitive development characteristics and mental development – it will definitely have negative impacts,” Noorca said on Wednesday (18 March).
According to Noorca, the audio-visual power in film has an extremely strong recording capacity. Certain scenes can be stored in a child’s memory into adulthood. He recounted his own childhood experience, still remembering film scene fragments despite having forgotten the film’s title.
Specifically, the LSF has asked parents to keep children away from films containing elements of violence and romantic scenes with physical contact. Such content is feared to trigger unhealthy imagination in children.
“Scenes of violence will certainly disturb children or underage people,” he explained. “So they will fantasise about what that scene feels like, even if they are only five years old, for example.”
As part of the National Self-Censorship Culture Movement, the LSF has divided film classifications into four colour categories to facilitate public understanding.
To strengthen field monitoring, the LSF collaborates with the Association of Indonesian Cinema Operators (GPBSI) through the Cinema Self-Censorship Awareness Movement, which has been running since 2022.
Through this initiative, cinemas play an active role in guiding audiences to select films appropriate for their age group.
One concrete measure is displaying different colour codes for each film in the ticketing system, enabling parents to directly identify content suitability for their children.