Festival Film Dokumenter 2022

Celebrating the 21st year of the competition program, Festival Film Dokumenter received a wide array of vibrant documentary films from around Indonesia and all over the world. This program consistently strives to show documentary films that are reflective and intervene the social reality through creative ways of storytelling.

In this year of 2022, we have received 400 films that are selected by a committee of fellows from within and also good supporters of FFD from over the years. Luckily, the numbers and quality of films has been growing over the past four years of it’s being divided in four categories. The four categories in competition are International Feature-length Documentary, Indonesian Feature-length Documentary, Short Documentary, and Student Documentary.

We selected 3 student documentary films, 8 short documentary films, 3 Indonesian feature-length documentary films, and 8 of international feature-length documentary films to be screened during the six-day festival. From each category, the team of final juries will award one winner that will be announced at the closing night of the festival. The competition program honors the emergence of documentaries with perspectives, storytelling styles, and colorful approaches every year, and hence we look forward to having more in the upcoming future.

— Rugun Sirait & Riskya Duavania
Program Coordinator

Celebrating the 21st year of the competition program, Festival Film Dokumenter received a wide array of vibrant documentary films from around Indonesia and all over the world. This program consistently strives to show documentary films that are reflective and intervene the social reality through creative ways of storytelling.

In this year of 2022, we have received 400 films that are selected by a committee of fellows from within and also good supporters of FFD from over the years. Luckily, the numbers and quality of films has been growing over the past four years of it’s being divided in four categories. The four categories in competition are International Feature-length Documentary, Indonesian Feature-length Documentary, Short Documentary, and Student Documentary.

We selected 3 student documentary films, 8 short documentary films, 3 Indonesian feature-length documentary films, and 8 of international feature-length documentary films to be screened during the six-day festival. From each category, the team of final juries will award one winner that will be announced at the closing night of the festival. The competition program honors the emergence of documentaries with perspectives, storytelling styles, and colorful approaches every year, and hence we look forward to having more in the upcoming future.

— Rugun Sirait & Riskya Duavania
Program Coordinator

Celebrating the 21st year of the competition program, Festival Film Dokumenter received a wide array of vibrant documentary films from around Indonesia and all over the world. This program consistently strives to show documentary films that are reflective and intervene the social reality through creative ways of storytelling.

In this year of 2022, we have received 400 films that are selected by a committee of fellows from within and also good supporters of FFD from over the years. Luckily, the numbers and quality of films has been growing over the past four years of it’s being divided in four categories. The four categories in competition are International Feature-length Documentary, Indonesian Feature-length Documentary, Short Documentary, and Student Documentary.

We selected 3 student documentary films, 8 short documentary films, 3 Indonesian feature-length documentary films, and 8 of international feature-length documentary films to be screened during the six-day festival. From each category, the team of final juries will award one winner that will be announced at the closing night of the festival. The competition program honors the emergence of documentaries with perspectives, storytelling styles, and colorful approaches every year, and hence we look forward to having more in the upcoming future.

— Rugun Sirait & Riskya Duavania
Program Coordinator

Celebrating the 21st year of the competition program, Festival Film Dokumenter received a wide array of vibrant documentary films from around Indonesia and all over the world. This program consistently strives to show documentary films that are reflective and intervene the social reality through creative ways of storytelling.

In this year of 2022, we have received 400 films that are selected by a committee of fellows from within and also good supporters of FFD from over the years. Luckily, the numbers and quality of films has been growing over the past four years of it’s being divided in four categories. The four categories in competition are International Feature-length Documentary, Indonesian Feature-length Documentary, Short Documentary, and Student Documentary.

We selected 3 student documentary films, 8 short documentary films, 3 Indonesian feature-length documentary films, and 8 of international feature-length documentary films to be screened during the six-day festival. From each category, the team of final juries will award one winner that will be announced at the closing night of the festival. The competition program honors the emergence of documentaries with perspectives, storytelling styles, and colorful approaches every year, and hence we look forward to having more in the upcoming future.

— Rugun Sirait & Riskya Duavania
Program Coordinator

The world as we see and experience it today, is the way it is because it carries all the wounds accumulated throughout the history of Western modernity. This world of wounds is based on the crimes committed by modernity–from slavery to colonialism with racism as an ideological weapon. Many of these wounds that have never been repaired tend to become invisible. Though they have not completely disappeared, their symptoms continue to manifest themselves. Even if material and intangible wounds inflicted by colonialism seem irreparable, we cannot continue to deny them or ignore them with silence.

As he departed Algeria after the independence war, Albert Camus, descendent of French settler in this country, wrote in his last novel The First Man: “Since what we have made here is a crime, it has to be wiped out.”

The list of the crimes of colonialism is so long that many of them remain invisible till today. While at the same time, making these crimes invisible has also been a weapon of control for the colonizer, claiming victory while disavowing all responsibility.

Although repairing all of them seems to be a never-ending task, there is a need for many people to move beyond this discouragement. It is through the process of identifying these wounds, listening to them, reflect upon them, talk about them and take care of them, that these countries will be able to reinvent themselves.

There are many ways to approach this difficult task, but I believe that art through different medias can be a powerful one and successfully contribute to it. Making documentary films is a way to understand and heal these traumas, and access to material or immaterial archives is an essential task which contribute to multiply knowledge and experience.

All these films speaks about wounds of the past, collecting memories, repairing archives, bringing testimonies to the surface, and are means to find a ways to cure them. In Algeria, in Madagascar, in Bissau, and in Indonesia, this important process of reappropriating the past is the only way to heal and illuminate the present.

— Jean-Pascal Elbaz
Programmer

In a film production, from pre-production to post-production involves many roles from multi-disciplinary backgrounds–which undeniably entails a large amount of money and time. Through this program, I invite you to check out some short films. Some aspects of the production of these films are deliberately not executed, not presented, skipped, or ignored by the film-makers. In other words, if it is seen from the aspect of production, they are incomplete and undisciplined films–at least when we are talking about the standard film production process. These films have an inclination to show their creative power, even, it successfully discovers artistic aspects that are (apparently) very exploratory in documentary production while carrying a message.

There are Fish in the Water and Rice in the Field is a film in which they did not undergo the process of shooting, but they utilized Google Street View in capturing the scene. Street Opera, a documentary that films (source) the sounds emitted by various devices and noises created by street vendors when hawking their wares around villages in Jakarta. The main act of the film–if I may say so–is organized in line and in harmony with the creation of melodious musical compositions from the collection of noise, “watching sound”, where sound is the subject of the film itself. The film entitled (((O))) is quite different. The combination of images that associate certain sounds and sounds that sometimes do not directly correlate with poetic visuals throughout the film, the editing of soft and rough sounds, sometimes, and images, with soft and expressive voice-overs, and nearly poetic texts, scripts, and film scenes. The one that is needed to underline is the film-maker states that this film can be watched with your eyes closed.

Transparent I am, a self-portrait poem with a cross-disciplinary approach, featuring an archive of personal works in the form of drawings, photography, scribbles, sketches, paintings, memories, and stories presented in a very personal way. An artistic approach by processing archives of videos, still photography, and sounds that are, then, arranged to talk about a specific topic, can also be found in Blinded by the Light which shows the stories of Thai film workers. It, even, incorporates performance art in the Chronicle of Nowhere which talks about how the human desire discovering utopia through futuristic architectural projects that are not fully completed and ends up being abandoned. In the short film, The Partian, there is no verbal narrative, but we, as the audience, are invited for a walk to take a look at the situation of the problematic landscape which is nearly Mars by its nearly-astronaut character in a near-fiction documentary.

The indiscipline of these films–if I may say so–can be pictured as if we get into schools or other places where shoes are required and forbid us from wearing slippers. However, instead of wearing shoes, these films are like those people who get into the places wearing slippers.

The incompleteness of these films seems to be someone who is incapable of conveying his thoughts verbally in a clear way. However, is that true? The incompleteness is a loophole, an empty space given by the films to us as the audience to choose whether or not to fill it out. A space that allows the audience to be free and to actively participate. The emancipatory space for thinking and speculating to complete the films that lets the audience share their diverse thoughts to fill the incompleteness. At the end, it is a complete spectacle and experience where a film finds its own audience. Happy watching and discovering the invisible ghosts of the Atacama Desert in Fantasmagoria. The same ghost which is everywhere infiltrating our living space.

— Wimo Ambala Bayang
Programmer

The advances of technology-in this case means a film-not only about production or distribution of filmmaking, it is also about the medium of film itself and the platform on which or how it is presented. Immersive media experiences allow us to take far beyond the limitations of flat screens.

Does media immersive really work in eliciting empathy? The basic question of this technology brought us to experience on Meet Mortaza – a journey of an Afghan refugee on his memories, dreams and struggles. Meantime, exploring the history of cinema as narrated by production designer Dean Tavoularis in Kinosscope brought us to a lesson about immersive cinema.

Then jump to another query; is it possible to use virtual reality with a journalistic documentary approach?, Revivre Notre Dame– a journey that dive into stunning sceneries of Notre Dame cathedral before and after the tragic fire, to the recording of the Rivonia in Accused #2: Walter Sisulu that revived the politics of Mandela in Africa that uses sound archives to revive 265 hours of gripping battling relentless aggression. Might be virtual reality films will bring us to possibilities that come from various forms, approaches and other intersections in documentary.

—Alia Damaihati
Programmer