The Tone Wheels

Documentary films in Indonesia have gone through various dynamics that verify each other between mediums and spaces that concerned documentaries. The mixture of form, language, approaches, and exploration of the medium has surpassed the progress and expansion of Indonesian documentary. Film is able to bring complexity through their symbols and language, as well as create creative interaction between film, moment and the society. And documentary is one of the mediums which can be legitimate to explore the fact, moment, and reality of society with various perspectives, forms, and approaches.

Defining diversity in documentary is an abstract that arises from various dialectics that involve the intersection of medium, exploration, ideas, to spatial practice. The films on Lanskap Programme that offer an exploration of visual language through various strong narrative and perspectives. Feature films that produced with visual archive on Segudang Wajah Para Penantang Masa Depan, brought strong narrative about Indonesian cinema that represent the anxiety of the era; then Tropic Fever which reveal the racial an spatial traces of colonial plantations and their interrelationships with contemporary society, brought another exploration into the current Indonesian documentary.

Struggling and surviving from marginalization might be the absolute truth that is narrated in the film of Mayday! May day! Mayday!, Bara, and Roda-Roda Nada, which records the reality and the twists of struggle. Meanwhile the limitedness of situation, are surpassed in various ways on the films Kemarin Semua Baik-Baik Saja, End of The Tunnel, and Xabi: Sebuah Petualangan Fantasmagoria; as well as Pulang dan Berulang bring us not only the narrative stories that built and approaches are chosen, but also the spatial dialectic encountered. The discussion of Indonesian documentaries will be shifted from various contexts along with the dynamic of the medium and ecosystem.

—Arie Kamajaya
Programmer