Tino Saroengallo's body of water

Tino Saroengallo's body of water

Dewi Anggraeni, Contributor, Melbourne, Australia

As someone who relies a great deal on instinct, when I finally
came face-to-face with Jakarta-born Tino Saroengallo, I knew I
had been cut down to size. I quietly deferred, though on the
surface Tino deferred to me because of my age.

You get an inkling of the depth of Tino's instinctual capacity
when you see his award winning The Army Force Them to be Violent,
the first documentary film to be screened in commercial cinema in
Indonesia. No one without a fair degree of primal instinct would
have come out unscathed from filming those events.

Instinct, in Tino's life, has been working hand-in-glove with
creativity, beating the path of his life, and driving his work
which flows and turns as life necessities requires it. Tino has
never even attempted to preshape his future.

"Unlike many people, I've never had a particular ambition, or
dreams for that matter. I just move with the flow. My life is
like water," he said, sipping his cappuccino, at the cafeteria in
the Victorian College for the Arts complex, in Melbourne.

He began his story with a surprise. He was a graduate of the
Maths-Science stream in secondary school in the mid-1970s in
Jakarta. Tino did not see it as a mistake, however. "The Maths-
Science stream is very versatile. Let's face it, our secondary
school doesn't really mold you into anything in life," he said
casually.

If you believe the theory that the left-side of your brain is
for rational thinking and the right-side for creativity, Tino
must have been using the left-side of his brain during his school
years, and kept the right-side of his brain active at the same
time. When the time came for him to choose a university course,
he decided that all he wanted to do was to study a language. So
off to the School of Letters of the University of Indonesia he
went.

There he was counseled by dean Dr. Benny Hoed, who suggested
he consider taking up French, Chinese or Japanese. Being a fan of
Khoo Ping Ho, Tino decided on Chinese.

Fate must have been waiting for him already, because during
his first year he met a friend who had just returned from Taiwan,
who impressed him greatly with his fluency in Chinese. So Tino
believed that if he wanted to be serious, he would have to go and
study in Taiwan too. Lucky for him, his parents were able to fork
out the necessary funds.

"It was also in Taiwan that I lost my innocence, so to speak,"
Tino confessed, grinning, between sips of cappuccino. He worked
hard at his studies nonetheless.

A year and a half later, he realized it was time for him to
return to Indonesia, because his roommate told him that he'd
begun to talk in Chinese in his sleep.

During his last years of university, his fellow students began
to map out their careers, which never strayed far from the
diplomatic corps, intelligence service or academia. Tino knew he
would not survive in any kind of bureaucracy. "I didn't have the
stomach for that," he confided.

While feeling around for what to do, he began to take up odd
jobs like door-to-door selling, which was at the time very
unusual for university students to do.

Lucky for him Harry Kawilarang and Aristides Katoppo "rescued"
him by inviting him to join their publication, Mutiara, which was
right up his alley at the time. He continued working for them
after his graduation from his university course.

Several years went by before restlessness overtook him, and he
began to look around. He had interesting stints with magazines as
varied as Ekstra and Jakarta-Jakarta, always avoiding being
pulled into the system, maintaining his freelance status.

Tino's first foray into the audio-visual world was when he was
invited to join an RCTI private television station crew making
feature news, where he worked with expatriate Jeremy Allan
producing Jakarta Masa Kini (Jakarta Today). "Unfortunately,
three months later the program was deemed a failure by the
management of RCTI," Tino recounted matter-of-factly.

In the beginning of the 1990s Tino was producing Rocket music
program, this time holding the lofty position of program manager.

"I learned how to produce by trial and error," he said. Yet he
managed to take his program around Indonesia. That was also where
he learned how to organize a traveling crew, producing a
television show.

When he outgrew Rocket, he moved into producing with another
expatriate, Scott McGregor, sit-coms Dunia Dara (Women's World),
about single, independent women living in a house together, and
the male version Buana Jaka (Men's World), portraying four
single, independent men living together.

Fate then introduced him to the world of advertising where his
friend and colleague Garry Hayes convinced him that he should be
a director, before going on to produce Simfoni. "That was a
challenge," said Tino, "because Simfoni was a live show, screened
every weeknight."

Tino's first brush with feature films turned out to be an
awesome experience. As location manager of the film Victory, he
found himself working with an all-professional crew, members of
which had made films like Little Buddha, The Last Emperor and
Superman I, II, III, IV. He learned to work professionally during
that time.

"Now there are books like Movie Magic, which guide you
step-by-step," he said. "I learned the hard way."

During that time he also found himself working with stars like
Willem Da Foe and Sam Neill. They made Yin & Yank, which later
was renamed The Last to Surrender.

Tino drifted from one work to another, until May 1998, when he
felt the urge to do something memorable. He looked around and saw
the political situation quickly unraveling, picked up his camera
and made The Army Force Them to be Violent, which was shown in
the Indonesian Film Festival (IFFEST) 2002 in Melbourne, from
Oct. 1 to Oct. 6.

Tino was involved in the making of several full-length feature
films shown there, such as Ca Bau Kan and Pasir Berbisik.

We shall wait for the next yield from Tino's creative soul.