A Way of Life

Four emerging documentary filmmakers try to share stories from across Indonesia, a country of tens of thousands of islands and hundreds of ethnic groups and languages. Portraits of the complexity of human relationships with nature based on the Mandar river culture, along with personal stories of human and earth relationships in a form of lifelong caretaking works, the dilemma of young people and traditional legacy, to the relationship between mothers and children as a transgenerational wound will be presented through this program.

It is not an easy thing to capture Indonesia with its plurality and variety of problems. The filmmakers in this program try to present it in a very close intention by underlining personal, communal, and natural relations. Without the pretension of making this an omnibus, each film is felt to be able to present the director’s vision that manifests in various forms, including intangibility, sound, detailed dialogues, and the subject of the films themselves. At one point, we realize that Indonesian documentaries are not just about simply following subjects or capturing events then stitching them on the editing table.

The four films in this program are the awarded films from Indonesia Documentary Lab 2023, a documentary project incubation program to develop storytelling and production skills for aspiring documentary filmmakers in Indonesia initiated by Forum Film Dokumenter with the full support of the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Indonesia.

–Kurnia Yudha F.
Programmer