Garden Amidst the Flame

Since its birth, cinema has been an otherworldly presence. An audience’s surprise at the documentation of a train passing by on the screen during Lumiere’s first film screening had already taken place earlier when the magic lantern played ghostly figures. This phenomenon shows how cinema is actually close to “otherworldly” things outside the daily lives of its audience.

Documentary itself, in its own development, has also begun to access things beyond the realm of everyday life, such as dreams, trauma, mysticism, and so on. In this context, of course, the approach of documentarians also has an impact on visual approaches that may be different from other practices. This also includes the notion of contemporary cinema, which tries to revisit the practices of the B cinema approach as a method. That means, the hierarchical structure in the modern tradition is no longer valid today. Seeing the range of issues taken up in contemporary cinema is also a matter of experience in the deepest niches of the personal, non-human, and the world of the grotesque.

The mundane becomes a sort of approach because it contains personal diversity. As in The Book of Life and Three Stories about Women and the Unseen in the Midst of the Pandemic (2023), a sort of women’s stories that reopen the tension between the past and the present, loss and so on, as daily stories that are traced personally. Meanwhile, Garden Amidst the Flame (2023) is a reflection in looking at the archaic knowledge of the people in Minahasa, who form their own world that erases the hierarchy between humans and non-humans, which creates its own cinema language because of the loss of realist and non-realist distinctions. The experience of grotesque cinema is also a complex one, no longer an independent visual matter, but in Di Balik Rupa (2023), it also tries to trace the past and its representation through what goes on behind the scenes, especially how history is a fiction that contains various artistic works in shaping its horror.

Have a great time watching Grotesque Cinema!

–Akbar Yumni
Programmer