Punk film director with a DIY attitude

M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta

Millions of people may have listened to punk music and claim to have been inspired, mostly politically, by the manic musical genre.

Only a few, though, who listen to it undergo a political or artistic enlightenment in its wake.

After all, how many people listen to the Clash's Revolution Rock and start their own revolution?

Canadian filmmaker Douglas Crawford is one of those few who listened to punk music and later took up arms -- in his case a camera -- to embrace filmmaking as his means of expression to change the world.

A callow youth in the early 1980s who lived in his affluent hometown, Toronto, Crawford's life was never the same again after listening to a song from California-based punk outfit Dead Kennedys. Holiday in Cambodia is a track from the band's 1980 album Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables.

"That was the first time I learned about the genocide. I had never seen it on television or read about it in a newspaper," Crawford told The Jakarta Post after a screening of his new film The Punks Are Alright: A Punk Safari from the First World to the Third at the Jakarta International Film Festival (JiFFest).

An attack on both Third World totalitarianism and Western complacency, lyrics in Holiday also carry a brutal depiction of the mass killings perpetrated by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.

Although the song did not instantly prompt him to become a filmmaker, it somehow gave him the drive to become aware of what went on around him and ingrained him with a new sensitivity that would make him turn to film later on.

"Punk music is very political: It teaches you about being aware of everything around you; I don't think that happens very often with hip-hop, rock, dangdut or other kinds of music," he said, adding that punk motivated him to become an anarchist who didn't recognize any rules.

To pay tribute to the music that lifted him up to a new political plane years ago, Crawford shot The Punks within the last three years.

Profiling three punk bands, Forgotten Rebels from Canada, Blind Pigs from Brazil and Superman Is Dead from Kuta, Bali, the film tells of the liberating power of punk music through the eyes of Dolly, a 22-year old living in Tangerang who struggles to make ends meet.

Douglas started the project as a short documentary film about the Forgotten Rebels before finding out about the Blind Pigs, a Brazilian band that idolized their Canadian counterparts.

While interviewing the Blind Pigs, Crawford learned that the band had a die-hard fan in Indonesia named Dolly. This was the connection that held the film together.

Remaining true to the spirit of punk, the film was made entirely under a do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos, conduct that has lent the film truly "independent" status.

With no financial support from either the Canadian government or any private institution, Crawford had to dig deep into his own pocket to finance The Punks.

Every individual or institution that he ran into for money turned down his proposal.

"The government said that it was not artistic enough, while TV stations thought that the subject would not generate enough money," he said.

As a result, Crawford had to rely on friends and family to produce the film. "People told me it was a crazy thing to do, to go to Indonesia and Brazil and do everything by myself," the 38- year-old recalled.

Production for the film wrapped up only two weeks before JiFFest started and left Crawford without a cent in his bank account.

In the course of filmmaking Crawford also found out much about Indonesia and its punk scene.

For the first time in his life, he discovered there was a punk scene in the largest Muslim country in the world.

Subsequently, he was surprised at the positive attitude embraced by local punks.

"There is a commune of punks who live in the vicinity of Halim Perdanakusumah airbase; they are active in developing a poor neighborhood," he said.

More than anything else, punk music serves as a powerful catalyst for disaffected youths here to let go of their pent-up frustration, Crawford believes.

"With so many problems that people have to deal with on an everyday basis, they have every reason to be angry. In the developed world people are kind of play-acting punk -- there's no genuine energy," he said.

Crawford's DIY method and his political stance belie that he once worked in the Hollywood film industry.

Soon after completing film and broadcasting studies at Centennial College, Toronto, Crawford worked, among others, with Joel Surnow, creator of blockbuster series 24, Alex Gibney, director of incendiary documentary Enron: The Smartest Guy In the Room and worked as picture editor for the La Femme Nikita series.

Hollywood and the money it offered did not give him much satisfaction, though.

Douglas left after learning all that he could at Tinseltown. "I don't think I can learn any more in a big Hollywood sort of environment. I'd learned all they could teach me there."

Detachment from the big movie studios gives Crawford enough freedom to shoot whatever he wants without having to be shackled by the industry's dos and don'ts.

His next project will be a film about the Cambodian genocide from the Canadian perspective.

Crawford's journey in punk has now gone full circle.