The landscape of Indonesian documentary film development has moved beyond the traditional aesthetic approaches. In the midst of an ever-evolving digital era, the history of Indonesian cinema needs to be understood in a more open manner. The diversity of new practices and experiments creates narrative innovations and visual forms that transcend conventional documentary boundaries. Unlike the traditional canon approach that emphasises pinnacle achievements such as festival-winning films, digital cinema offers a more fluid and personalised form, creating space for more inclusive and varied narratives. Noncompetition programmes at film festivals are an important means to break the linear paradigm of cinema history. Such works emphasise the evolving creative process, including the use of personal archives and new elements such as body choreography. Cinema history should be seen as something that is constantly being reproduced, not just as a major recorded event.
One of the noncompetition programmes presented in FFD 2024, Lanskap: Scope of Cinema, provides an opportunity for documentary films with various artistic visions to circulate their discourses to the public. In this programme, there are four films that have been curated by Akbar Yumni as the fellow programmer of Lanskap. The films are OSMOSIA (Fioretti Vera, 2023), Outside the Frame (Micko Boanerges, 2023), Flow of Migrants (Wahyu Budiman Dasta, 2024), and Three Parts of Life (Rela) (Bagaskara Dwitya Bima Asmara, 2024). Having previously been screened at the last screening session at Ruang Seminar, Taman Budaya Yogyakarta (TBY) (6/11/2024), the four films were screened for the second time at Militaire Societeit, TBY (8/11/2024).
After the screening session, the audience was able to interact and take part in a QnA session with the filmmakers. Fioretti Vera (Director of OSMOSIA), Wahyu Budiman Dasta (Director of Flow of Migrants), and Bagaskara Dwitya Bima Asmara and Hasan Faizal (Director and Producer of Three Parts of Life) attended the session. The session was moderated by Alia Damaihati, Festival Director of FFD 2024.
The creative work behind documentary filmmaking, both research and production, was the first topic of discussion in this session. Hasan shared his involvement as a producer in the making of Three Parts of Life (2024) with Bagas. Initially, he was looking for a place to stay because he could not return to Demak, his hometown. However, when he met Bagas, Hasan was offered his unfinished project (read: this film). After the meeting, they re-recorded some scenes as documentary material and tried to find other family archives, such as letters and diaries. Unfortunately, in their search in Kalimantan, at Bagas’ grandmother’s childhood home, they were unable to find the archives they needed. As a result, they took additional footage of the daily events of Bagas’ grandmother, the protagonist in the documentary they were working on.
The production process, which began in early 2023, attempts to retell the moments and wounds in Bagas’ grandmother’s life. Technical considerations of storytelling in conveying the intended discourse make it stand between subtle narratives that are both liminal and personal. Because he lives in the same house, Bagas is always close to interact with his grandmother in his daily life. He also received stories about his daughter––Bagas’ mother––who married the man of her choice and eventually religiously converted. This memory is told continuously by Bagas’ grandmother along with the memory of losing her loved one–her husband. However, to avoid bias, she chose to create a little distance from these stories. She then takes a liminal perspective to see the possibilities that occur in old age and the loneliness that we will experience in the future.
Behind the soundscape that explores cultural phenomena in Flow of Migrants (2024), technically the materials that were ready to be made into a documentary had been collected since August 2023. At that time, Wahyu, Luber (Van Luber Parensen) and Hafiz Rancajale, their mentor at Milisifilem, received an offer from a Korean documentary team––one of whom was an audio professor––who wanted to record the context of water in several countries. In Indonesia, they wanted to film the outskirts of Jakarta and talk about ‘Jakarta Tenggelam,’ one of which was Kalibata Pulo, South Jakarta. The recordings collected since 2023 resulted in nearly 60 audio archives and around 30-40 video recordings. Wahyu then examined the corpus of audio archives and curated and collaged the recordings into a film frame to narrate territorial discourse.
Unlike Bagas, Hasan and Wahyu who have a background in filmmaking and audiovisual work, Vera comes from a vocal artist (singer) background. Her interest and curiosity about the composer of the song ‘Merah Putih’, which is often sung in various ceremonies, led her to conduct archival research on I Gde Dharna. The research led her to meet a source who told her about I Gde Dharna, not only as a writer, but also as a songwriter. In fact, the song archive in I Gde Dharna’s house reached 212 songs, in addition to his songs that were not well archived, such as the song ‘Buah Buni.’ From the various archival corpus and observations she made, Vera chose the audiovisual medium of documentary film to present the results of her archival work. This medium was also chosen to represent the discourse that she compiled to introduce the figure of I Gde Dharna as a maestro songwriter who is closely related to the discourse of ecological justice.
One of the audience members in this session, Isti, appreciated Bagas for making a film that she thought was very natural. She then compared Three Parts of Life (2023) with the film (series) Mbangun Deso (1988-2008) featuring Den Baguse Ngarso, as played by Susilo Nugroho. Isti also questioned the response of the protagonist in the film (Bagas’ grandmother) when her personal life was recorded and immortalised on film. In addition, she also questions whether the performers in OSMOSIA (2023) are dancers who have their own concepts or choreographies conceptualised by Vera, the director.
In response to the question, Bagas recounted his grandmother’s response to seeing the documentary film as a memory of the events she had gone through. He also hoped that the film could be watched and remembered by the next generation. Vera also explained that the actors in the film were singers and dancers. Based on the curated archive, she presented the text she had compiled to be dissected together. She also collaborated with a choreographer from Bali named Gusbang (Bagus Bang Sada) to interpret the text into the form conceptualised by Vera.
The next question came from Yonri Revolt who asked about the director’s reasoning and statement regarding Vera and Wahyu’s artistic vision that is quite visually radical. Wahyu then explained the creative process in the production of his documentary film which basically prioritises the audio context. From late 2013 to early 2024, Wahyu and his colleagues at Sigisora intensely discussed the way censorship works in the visual realm and compared its development with the audio realm in 2024. From Sigisora’s research, Wahyu tried to examine the audio context in film. “Is the audio context that we have known since we were babies (sound), what is the sensory of immediacy like? That’s talking about the context of the discourse, why is it shown more in the perspective of the film frame,” he said. He then talked about the dramaturgy and artistic vision used as a method of creation that was also shown (read: referred to) in Expedition Content (Veronika Kusmaryati, Ernst Karel; 2020).
Vera went on to explain her choice of featuring a vertical, hologram-like archive of interview footage with glitchy, flickering negative pixelation images. She imagines the images in the totem to be future archival footage. The vertical format was chosen to provide an experience like watching reels on a mobile screen. Wahyu chose dialogue as the frame of discourse circulation in his film and re-examined the dialectical context presented in the field. Responding to Nurul’s question about such aesthetic choice, Wahyu said that in the process of Kalibata Pulo Village, there is a dialectic rhythm presented by the migrants who come from various regions, one of which is Makassar. The sounds are then processed into the results of audio ethnography from various dialogues. That’s what he thinks makes Jakarta’s territorial context dense.
The last question in this session was asked by Dwani, who questioned the method used by Bagas to limit the personal stories presented in his film. “This way of limiting is quite difficult for me,” Bagas said, starting his explanation. He then discussed with Hasan, as his producer, to consider the right way to limit personal stories so that they are not too clearly told in the public space. As a result, he decided not to use spoken narration, but to present another narrative through the moving images he presented.
The non-competition programme in the festival space provides an opportunity for various forms of artistic visions of documentary films to come to the surface. The films are screened in a wider space to circulate each discourse they carry. OSMOSIA (2023) can introduce the figure of I Gde Dharna and his ecological discourse through opera methodology, Outside the Frame (2023) presents a natural conversation about urban facades in static footage, Flow of Migrants (2024) is able to present a dense territorial discourse through sound recordings in a dark screen display, and Three Parts of Life (2024) takes us through the personal story of a grandmother in silent collages.
Documentary films always have a way of voicing the discourse of their makers. Screening opportunities and impact distribution are spaces that should be expanded more widely, one of which is through noncompetition programmes such as Lanskap: Scope of Cinema in FFD 2024.
Covered by Ahmad Radhitya Alam on November 8, 2024. (Ed/Trans. Vanis)
