Festival Film Dokumenter 2014

It was thirteen years ago when Festival Film Dokumenter was first presented to the public. The festival’s initiators were some concerned audience who teel that there are limited accesses to documentary film. This festival was the answer to their concern, it created and now opening more accesses for many people to watch documentary films

FFD is a continuous program managed by Forum Film Dokumenter. It is an annual and a closing program for other programs managed by the forum, monthly screening and film archiving program.

In September 2014, Festival Film Dokumenter received an award for the Best Festival from Apresiasi Film Indonesia. an awarding event held by the Ministry of Education and Culture. This motivates us to work harder to make this festival even better, considering we are the oldest festival in Southeast Asia that is focused only on documentaries. We have all the resources to introduce documentary lr as an alternative medium for education to wider audience

This year, we are still trying to accommodate that mission. We will have 4 venues which are associated with learning space yet can represent the festival’s needs. This is our attempt to bring the film closer to the audience and more accessible. We will also make an art exhibition from our Documentar Appreciation workshop that was held from September to October. This exhibition encourages us that appreciation to documentary film can he expressed through many medium

I would like to thank every person/parties that was involved in the making of this festival: to the energetic and creative filmmakers, to Tembi Rumah Budaya and other partners, and to tireless and determined volunteers. At last, this festival can once again presented to the audience.

Michael A. C. Winanditya

Q : What is documentary for?

A : To record actuality.

Q : Why would one want to do that?

A : To inform people about it.

Q : Inform to what ends?

A : Either to affect our understanding – to change, increase, reinforce it – which may (but not necessarily design to) lead an action, may make a better persons of us, and which may in turn make the world a better place to live (Flaherty); or to make better citizens of us and to move us to collective action in order to make a better society (Grierson)

(Jack C. Ellis in The Documentary Idea1)

That short colloquy tries to elaborate the potentials of documentary film on the audience in which at least rooting from the two grand traditions of documentary, Flaherty or Grierson style. Both of them are founding fathers of documentary film basis that nowadays evolve into various styles as we can see in these several programs of 2014 FFD.

JOURNEY! : Direction for Knowing and Understanding

If we reopen history records of colonialism in Indonesia, amongst them are journals inserted by the explorers2. They came from Europe in an effort seeking new possibilities in ‘new’ lands. These explorers wrote many journals of their journey, collected many things to bring them home, exhibited in museums, and then studied them thoroughly. Their journals could be about flora and fauna until how people here live. However, their purpose of the journey is pretty similar to each other, which is to describe the condition of a place, and “interpret” it into their own thoughts. Methods for knowing and understanding about “other” began to develop in the end of the 19th century in institutions. It is exactly like what the modern anthropologists have done, that they leave the desk filled with piles of books to go to the place where this community lives. An experience of journey and living with people is becoming one of the methods to acknowledge and understand others. But now it arises a question: how is the partiality of this knowledge?

Journey could be freely translated as a journey from one place to another, usually, in a long time. “Journey” could also be used to define a process of a movement from one condition to another, from time to time. Therefore, in Indonesian we often hear the term, perjalanan waktu (time travel), perjalanan hidup (life journey), or perjalanan sejarah peradaban (journey of history of civilization).

This year, FFD offers Journey as a practice to understand the world. It is like a person going on a journey; he is in a space between his home and destination place, between imagined hope and past memory, or between reality on the screen and reality in the world where the dearest audience lives. We hope this festival could be a journey that opens up opportunities of new discovery in identifying the other and ourselves.

Alia Damaihati, Franciscus Apriwan, Kurnia Yudha F.