Jakarta and Gwangju are two significant cities that sparked the birth of democracy in Indonesia and South Korea, toppling dictators through people’s power in May 1998 and 1980. This work tells the story of the daily lives of two ticketing cinema staff during those May incidents. They never experienced it directly or went onto the streets to face the soldiers, yet the stories they heard and the voices that reached them felt like an endless war film replaying in their minds. This film is also woven from fragments of memories of people living around Jakarta and Gwangju and represented through found footage, film clips, and significant cinematic events that occurred in the same month.
Arief Budiman
Arief Budiman is an artist-filmmaker based in Yogyakarta, working with sonic traces, distorted histories, fabricated realities, desktop cinema, collage film, and media installations. His works has been selected for IFFR, VIFF, Visions du Réel, Images Festival, DMZ Docs, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, SGIFF, EMAF, VIENNA SHORTS, Transmediale, and Videotage.
Rugun Sirait
Rugun Sirait is an Indonesian producer and researcher working across documentary, experimental cinema, and media anthropology. Her practice is shaped by long-term interests in digital cultures, collective memory, and the relationship between media, technology, and everyday life. She is currently pursuing a project-based doctoral degree in Amsterdam.
What’s the thing that comes to your mind when you hear Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) screened in Indonesia for the first time? Long lines in front of the cinema? Trembling sobs at the end of the movie? Or something else that cracks off-screen, in the real world? I wasn’t born then. However, Last May in…
