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.