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.