On The Origin of Fear

The archives of Documentary Film Forum represent ideas and the way of speech of Indonesian filmmakers with its cultural complexity. Narration and speech delivered in some films often ended in a continuity that influenced other films during these two decades of FFD. Through program curation, Lanskap 21: 2 Dekade Dokumenter invites people to look back at the film archive as alternative literature. Covid-19 has not ended yet and still impacts changes in many sectors. The impact is also seen in cinema’s language and art speech until today, both from production pattern, distribution of movies on the network, to how to enjoy movies.

Cinema is the meeting point between reality and its images, and documentary is a medium for images that opens up dialectics through the landscape of events recorded by the camera’s perception. Like a lens, the meeting point is far from each other, but still inseparable. Determining the position and alignment of the camera in capturing events affects the narrative that is built so that the documentary is always socially and politically charged. Changes in documentary language and speech are shown from time to time through various intrinsic aspects, as well as being a separate sign in the journey of Indonesian documentary films. Exploration of Indonesian documentary films has so far relied on the issue area and the dynamics of storytelling which led to the diversity of documentary films being part of the scope of Indonesian cinema. In addition to storytelling, aesthetic approaches are also increasingly diverse, blurring the boundaries between film genres themselves. The emergence of various production training and funding forums has become significant in viewing the development of documentaries to this day so that efforts to practice the intersection between art media with an aesthetic approach and appropriate storytelling are still a long dream.

Lanskap 21: 2 Dekade Dokumenter presents 22 films consisting of 5 featured films and 17 short films and FFD’s film archives ranging from 2000-2020. In the process, this program strives to give a point of view in imagining a documentary as something more inclusive.

— Arie Kamajaya
Programmer