Tintin aims at filmmaking
Hera Diani, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
What do you do when you cannot sleep at night? Toss and turn? Count sheep? Smoke? Watch TV?
None of these work for Denpasar-based experimental filmmaker Maria Clementine Wulia, nicknamed Tintin, 29.
Having insomniac nights ever since she was a kid, she instead kept her mind running to get more and more ideas until it was quite difficult to handle.
The results are dozens of music compositions for various projects, film scores (one of them was for 2001's Jakarta Project) and at least two films that have won the San Francisco- based eveo.com competition and the recent Australian MAFIA (Music and Film Independent Artists) Documentary Award.
While any of us is already blessed simply to have just one talent, Tintin has many.
She is a trained musician (who plays at least piano and flute and has taught piano for years), a composer, a ballerina and an architect (graduated from Bandung's Parahyangan Catholic University -- Unpar).
"Architecture and music have so much in common. Both are different ways of telling a story," said Tintin in an interview via E-mail from Denpasar.
While still studying at Unpar, she received a scholarship from the Film Score Department of Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts and graduated in 1997, or a year before getting her degree in architecture.
It was at Berklee that she stumbled into filmmaking, working as a multimedia assistant.
After graduated from Berklee, she traveled to Germany and Switzerland, documenting a friend's band on tour, with a Hi8 video camera.
Two years later, a Japanese company which she had helped as well invited her to Tokyo.
"Those trips left me with some good footage," Tintin said.
At the end of 1999, she looked back and felt something was missing. She was writing music for TV ads at that time, but her primary job was teaching music.
"I felt that I was not doing enough to challenge myself. That was when my motivation to actually finish a short movie sparked," said Tintin, who admired producer/director Mira Lesmana and Riri Riza.
She then edited the footage into two short films, Are You Close Enough? and Violence Against Fruit. The first is a documentary about a monk, a film that deals with how a journey becomes a spiritual showcase for the relativity of time and space.
The latter, meanwhile, is a documentary of the disembowelment of an exotic fruit Diospyros Kaki, a story that was inspired by the May 1998 riots in the capital.
Are You Close Enough? was the Editor's Choice at the eveo.com while Violence won the Kuldesak Award for Best Conceptual Film in the 2000 Indonesian Film and Video Independent Festival (FFVII).
Both films were also included in the film market of the 2001 Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in Germany.
A few months later, Australian TV station SBS contacted her, asking for the broadcast rights for those films in Australia. Apparently, the films were the only ones they have acquired from the Indonesian section of the film market, and probably the first Indonesian films that were intended for broadcast in their arts program for short experimental films from around the world, Eatcarpet.
Tintin then went to Australia to take a course in filmmaking at the end of last year, thinking there might be some connection between her, filmmaking and Australia.
Early this year, she released another experimental documentary, Slambangricketychuck, which earned her the MAFIA award.
The seven-minute film is an effort to put film and music together in a special way. With her colleagues, Tintin took the streets of suburban Melbourne, knocked on doors, rang bells, buzzed buzzers and tapped on windows.
The people who opened their doors were then asked a series of questions about the doors they had just opened.
"The idea came as I realized that doors are really familiar objects that we see every day. And being very accustomed to doors, we don't even think about them anymore. I think the door has further potential, for example, as musical instruments," she said.
When you see Tintin's films, there is a deeper exploration of the subject. She is indeed into philosophy, triggered by an experience when she was only eight years old.
"My uncle, who is a Catholic priest, suddenly pinched me and asked whether it hurt. I said it did. And he said, 'how did you know? It might be only your mind telling you that it hurt. I might not exist. I might only be someone that you imagine. Maybe there's only your mind, floating somewhere, dreaming about you, imagining things about your arms being pinched by me.'
"And I thought, hey that's cool! And since then I liked to discuss 'nonsense' with anyone who was interested in discussing nonsense," she laughed.
Right now, Tintin is working on a documentary about Rimi Parmentier, Greenpeace activist who recently visited the Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) IV for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Bali.
"The reason to make the film is about my being ashamed of my own ignorance; I didn't know what PrepCom was all about, until I read in the newspaper that Greenpeace, WWF and other non- governmental organizations were here and they'd sent a letter to Kofi Annan, asking him to pay more attention to the PrepCom. I thought, well, this must be very serious and started to do a little research on it," she said.
There has been music, architecture and filmmaking. What next? Right now, the latter is still her focus. And like any other local filmmaker, she wants to see local films revive.
"To revive them, simply stop thinking too much about reviving them. Stop complaining, stop worrying, stop dreaming, stop being envious and stop keeping each other's head under water.
"If you want to make films and tell your story, do it right now because you can. If you have decided that you don't have a story of your own to tell, encourage others to be brave enough to tell their story."