Festival Film Dokumenter 2014

Fifty-nine documentaries are competing in Competition Program of Festival Film Dokumenter Yogyakarta. The films have passed the first-phase selection and 11 nominees have been selected for the upcoming final selection. This year’s nominees offer us interesting information and discourse. In “Biji Kopi Indonesia” and “Jenitri” we will see Indonesia’s famous and rather infamous commodity that have high selling value. “Akar” and “Kaum Hai Hum, Hum Yaahan Hai” tell us about Chinese and Pakistan descendant in Indonesia. “Tumiran”, “Segelas Teh Pahit”, and “Subakku Merana-Subakku Dipuja” raise a discussion about how traditional customs deal with dynamic change of time and society. “Penderes dan Pengidep”, “Marah di Bumi Lambu”, “Layu Sebelum Berkembang”, and “Menonton Penonton” that portray Indonesia from its economy, education, history and the media.

Happy watching!

Fifty-nine documentaries are competing in Competition Program of Festival Film Dokumenter Yogyakarta. The films have passed the first-phase selection and 11 nominees have been selected for the upcoming final selection. This year’s nominees offer us interesting information and discourse. In “Biji Kopi Indonesia” and “Jenitri” we will see Indonesia’s famous and rather infamous commodity that have high selling value. “Akar” and “Kaum Hai Hum, Hum Yaahan Hai” tell us about Chinese and Pakistan descendant in Indonesia. “Tumiran”, “Segelas Teh Pahit”, and “Subakku Merana-Subakku Dipuja” raise a discussion about how traditional customs deal with dynamic change of time and society. “Penderes dan Pengidep”, “Marah di Bumi Lambu”, “Layu Sebelum Berkembang”, and “Menonton Penonton” that portray Indonesia from its economy, education, history and the media.

Happy watching!

Fifty-nine documentaries are competing in Competition Program of Festival Film Dokumenter Yogyakarta. The films have passed the first-phase selection and 11 nominees have been selected for the upcoming final selection. This year’s nominees offer us interesting information and discourse. In “Biji Kopi Indonesia” and “Jenitri” we will see Indonesia’s famous and rather infamous commodity that have high selling value. “Akar” and “Kaum Hai Hum, Hum Yaahan Hai” tell us about Chinese and Pakistan descendant in Indonesia. “Tumiran”, “Segelas Teh Pahit”, and “Subakku Merana-Subakku Dipuja” raise a discussion about how traditional customs deal with dynamic change of time and society. “Penderes dan Pengidep”, “Marah di Bumi Lambu”, “Layu Sebelum Berkembang”, and “Menonton Penonton” that portray Indonesia from its economy, education, history and the media.

Happy watching!

The presence of “Retrospektif: Abraham Ravett” program is an effort to introduce the aesthetics of cinema to the audience, through the complexity of trips that can be interpreted by so many moments, events, and even from personal background to look into something more plural. Although experimental no longer be a new discourse in variants documentary, works Ravett may shed new discourse to the audience in Yogyakarta in particular.

Not just the notion that photography can evoke the memory of the past or nostalgia. The combination of medium used Ravett translate his personal journey and represent major events, his identity as a (immigrant) family history of Jews and connections through the passage of time. In each of his transcendental easily take out of context the memory of Nazi atrocities.

Through experimental documentary practice, Ravett have good commitment to the medium, as well as the consistency of translating search and memory of family background. The depiction of impressions and memories with the construction of truth in the abstract style is not simply translate a collage of memory and alignments but also a combination of documentary practice and theory.

— Sandeep Ray
Programmer

New Wave is often considered politically diverse representation and identity. The appreciation of the many New Wave films showed the idea of aesthetic that refers to the practice of cinematic. French New Wave movement is divided into two sub-groups; Cahiers du Cinema and the Left Bank Cinema. The period of time of great changes in the French New Wave cinema, though not as popular as Godard, and Rivette Trauffaut, but Varda gives strong and relevant colors often associated with Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais also Marguerite Duras. They are strongly associated with the movement of cinema complementary Rive Gauche (Left Bank Cinema) and the Nouveau Roman movement that developed in France mid 1950-1960’s.

Agnès Varda uses cinema as a specific form of artistic expression, to tell a subjective and personal statements that appear in almost every of his films; feminist issues, relationship memory, installation art and the things that are considered taboo in the social rules. The concept works in Varda explains how the practice of intellectual cinema on cinema itself and create different ways of seeing. In the context of broad social and historical, realist documentary raised through Varda, brought on a text and understanding of interdisciplinary and into a cohesive.

Just as memory is history, Varda brings personal spaces are no longer personal in The Beaches of Agnes, to provide space to the audience to map of her semiotic flow and realize how Varda reflects life through the mirrors. Even with Varda Tout Court, how the links or involvement of aesthetic experimentation and memory connections eloquently and often on the appear of photographs and motion picture footage, and the film is as the film itself.

— Alia Damaihati
Programmer

Human civilization has a set of things to trigger a memory. Let us called epigraph, monument, museum, or film. Such things usually contain tangible proof that we could witness it with our own eyes, including statues, dioramas or film scenes that could bring us to the imagination of what actually happening in the past. If we take a word from apparatus theorist, any tools and techniques used to make film are part of the reality itself; therefore reality is an expression of a dominant ideology.[i] And then what will happen to the minor narration of history? Will it be repressed forever because of the dominance?

In this session, FFD presents a journey across the time through film. These films were chosen as a trigger for us to imagine past events not from a mainstream narration of formal history, but from a minor narration that is repressed by the tyranny in the past time. This session presents Senyap (The Look of Silence), a documentary piece directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and Anonim, which tries to raise a historical narrative about a family, victim of a massacre in post 1965. Senyap (The Look of Silence) will become a time line to see a family exploring their silence story of the past.

The second film in this section is Sound of Silence, a documentary piece by Burmese filmmaker Thet Oo Maung. This film encourages a Burmese military veteran to recall his experience in the battlefield. One of interesting parts of this film is that Thet Oo Maung method using war footage to trigger a memory of the subject. Then, slowly he drags the war situation to the current condition in Myanmar.

War is Tender Thing is the third film in this menu. Andjani Arumpac, as director as well as narrator of this film, widely open tracks down the history of her family. Honest talks become her path to trace the impact of the long war happened in the southern Philippines.

The last film of this session is Nostalgia For The Light, by Patricio Guzman. This film encourages the audience to redefine the concept of time, history, past, and memory. One of the theses of this film is our existence in a firm relation to any chains of complicated cause and effect in the past. Patricio Guzman is a Chilean director who was also an exile in the era of Pinochet government. Nostalgia de la luz poetically tells how human defines the history of the past, from the most ancient through star observation, digging out the remnants of civilization, until a tireless effort of a family of the force elimination victim by the military junta in Chile between 1974-1988. For Indonesian audience, watching Nostalgia for the Light is also as a reflection on the history of violation in this country. In addition to the screening, a paper by Tri L. Astraatmadja, an astronomer in Max-Planck, Germany, will make it thorough as it also could enrich our study on the history of Chile and the world of astronomy.

— Ayu Diah Cempaka
Programmer

[i] Cited from Gaines, 1992 via Fauzanafi, 2012

Explorers in the end of 19^th century also contributed to the documentary film development. At that time, camera had been developing into varied forms, more simple and mobile. They carried it everywhere, away from home. They recorded daily life activities of people, landscapes, and various kinds of building in many cities in the world.  Later on, it is called Travelogue film. In the next phase of the development, many filmmakers go further away to find out an ethnic group in the most remote area, like a work of Robert Flaherty in the North Pole[i]. Such films that later become the basis of today’s documentary films, as we can see in this festival.

If above example is too old, Journey #2 will be one of the event record compilation about what’s happening in this dear mother earth recently. In this session, the films are categorized into two. In the first section we will see how people moves to demand their rights, like in The Park which the film will take the audience to Istanbul to trace down how the people protesting against the shopping center establishment inside the city park. Still in Turkey, Journey #2 will take the audience closer on the personal diary of a demonstrator who eagers to say “no” to the authoritative regime. Another story on protest is Shattered, a film by Ozair Rao, that pictures how poor people, who live in the planned city Putra Jaya, Malaysia, take their protest action. The last film of this section is coming from India through Cotton Dream, a film by Sandeep Balhara. It dramatically tells a community of farmer in Thanegaon, western India, who is entangled by debt because of extreme climate change and agriculture technology.

In the second section of Journey #2, we will make a journey to the northern side of Russia and Siberia. Hosted by Zima, a film by Cristina Picchi, which gently introduces us to the people who survive in the extreme climate. From the north we then take off to Iran to see Boys With Broken Ears, directed by Nima Shayeghi. This film follows three Iranian young men who struggle to achieve their dream to become the strongest wrestler in the world. It successfully explores and sketches how Iranian youngsters dedicate themselves to be “heroes” in wrestling. Our last story in this session is a passionate expectation of Jazz, a Filipino man, who longs for his couple arriving from Germany. You can see this romantic story of a gay couple in Jazz in Love, a film by Baby Ruth Villarama.

These two sections are classified according to the definition of documentary film stated in the short colloquy at the beginning of this writing. The first section is group of films that trigger an action to make better life of a community, while the second one is a group of films that could give us understanding on many things happened.

— Franciscus Apriwan
Programmer

[i] Looking closely, Robert Flaherty film on the Inuit people (Nanook of the North, 1922) is similar to the narration of the antropologist at that time who told each of the elements of culture in a community. His second film Moana, 1926, Flaherty lived with the people of Samoa over a year. Some say that John Grierson wrote a review on Moana in the New York Sun in 1926 and also for the first time introduced documentary film terminology to the public.