Festival Film Dokumenter 2007

This year FFD celebrates documentaries in a new program: Spektrum, screening colorful world documentaries beautifully refracted in a variety of styles and themes. Daniel Gordon brings politics into a very personal relationship with his subject, James Dresnok, an American deserter who defected to North Korea during the cold war in Crossing The Line. Meanwhile, Greg Hamilton, originally just a filmmaker outside the arena, later transformed into the subject of his own film when he filmed the Chinese game in Burma in Mystic Ball. Danny Schechter uses investigative journalism methods to investigate the policies of the American credit card industry in In Debt We Trust. Ron Havilio in Potosi, The Burney, revisits his past, collaging past and present memories in a neat travelogue. Gariné Torossian narrates his poetic diary with experimental drawings and is based on Armenian acapella music in Stone Time Touch. Kazuhiro Soda uses direct cinema techniques in the film Campaign, which reflects the political attitudes of contemporary Japanese society.

Another filmmaker, Linda Hattendorf in The Cat of Mirikitani, in a beautiful cinema verite style, immerses herself in her film, helping Mirikitani find his family. In “Short Spectrum”, a compilation of short films from Scotland, all of which have a ‘white’ theme, tell stories beautifully in various scenes, one of which is The Angelmaker which lyrically tells the story of the death of 140 people due to arsenic poisoning in a village in Hungary. Other films are no less interesting, with various uniqueness and stories, with various styles and genres, giving rise to a colorful mosaic of documentary films presented in the Spektrum FFD 2007 program.

In Perspektif, FFD has the theme Humanity, which presents films that voice contemporary human values. Starting with Rithy Panh with her latest film, Paper Can’t Wrap Embers, which enters the daily lives of sex workers in Cambodia as the opening film of the festival. Flying across China, Neo Lounge beautifully tells the story of overseas Westerners in Beijing who meet and interact with various people in bars. La fille du Juge tells the story of a little girl who was the daughter of a bomber in Paris who tries to forget her nightmare. The film Zone of Initial Delution takes a close-up look at the banks of the Yangtze River. From Appalshop, America, comes the film Morristown, the story of Mexican immigrants who often receive discriminatory treatment in America. Perspektif give a special platform for stories of humanism in Southeast Asia from the last five years, presented in a session titled “Take a Look Back to the SEA.” In Vietnam, Aki Ra takes care of Boreak who lost his leg due to a land mine he may have planted, in the film Aki Ra’s Boys. In Aceh, a Genting had to ‘Play among the Elephants’ in the post-tsunami reconstruction process, in the film Playing Between Elephants.

Meanwhile in Thailand, in Innocence, children from a mountain dream of seeing the end of a river that passes next to their school. In Burma, Major Mary is in exile, surviving the pursuit of the military regime that burned their village in Don’t Fence Me In. Meanwhile, on the outskirts of Thailand, people from Malaysia’s former communist party survive in exile while listening to radio plays on the Village People Radio Show. The films in the Perspektif invite us to pay attention to and be involved in various humanitarian issues in various parts of the world and Indonesia, including the film Renita-Renita by Tonny Trimarsanto.

FFD collaborates with guest programmer Joselito Acosta (Cinemanila) in the Southeast Asia program and Dimas Jayasrana who selects films from France. All films in these programs are screened free and open to the public. Prepare your eyes and hearts, enjoy the colorful documentaries at FFD 2007.

*Automatically translated via Google Translate with minor edits.

Let’s celebrate together this festival, a space for creative activities, appreciation and socialization, as well as education in the field of documentary films in the broadest sense. FFD 2007 presents Competitions, Masterclass, Perspektif, Spektrum, SchoolDoc, and other supporting activities, with material showing the best and alternative Indonesian and international documentaries, discussions, workshops, film clinics, public presentations, community meetings, among others.

The FFD Indonesian Documentary Film Competition has taken place for the sixth time, with a total of around 300 films participating from various parts of Indonesia. More than a matter of win-lose, this competition also opens up possibilities for the pursuit of social change and the development of the latest Indonesian documentary films. FFD may have played a role in documentary film documentation and data, which can and has been utilized in research in the field of film and more broadly socio-cultural aspects of Indonesia. This is one of the functions of organizing sustainable festivals and competitions, which often goes unnoticed.

As an effort to develop the knowledge of filmmakers and enrich the discourse on Indonesian documentary films, FFD designed a new Masterclass program: Encourage Indonesian Documentary. This compilation of five days of workshops, discussions, film clinics and sharing with national and international filmmakers and documentary practitioners was attended by competition finalists, representatives of the film community, and filmmakers who consistently produce documentary films, filtered mainly from their involvement in the FFD competition program. This program, which is supported by the Jan Vrijman Fund International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, presents two main speakers, Peter Wintonick and Anand Patwardhan, and accompanying speakers are Indonesian avant-garde documentary filmmakers.

Apart from that, we continue to try to implement other FFD programs better than previous years. FFD 2007 brings a humanitarian perspective, as an effort to pay attention to current social issues which are full of disasters and conflict. Meanwhile, the Spektrum program accommodates a colorful diversity of documentary film themes and genres. SchoolDoc, a special program for students, has been implemented since November 2007, as a warm-up and preparation towards the peak of the festival. Other special programs are carried out with collaboration from various institutions, including the Canadian Embassy, ​​Kampung Halaman Foundation, and Appalshop.

In the end, everything that exists and happens at this festival is the joint work of various institutions and individuals. Thank you from us, hopefully we can enjoy it together and find the enthusiasm to continue moving forward.

Welcome back to Jogja!

*Automatically translated via Google Translate with minor edits.