'€˜Disorder'€™: Huang Weikai'€™s film exposes the reality of Chinese society in transition through found footage from 26 daily incidents.

'€œThe local film scene at the end of the '€˜90s was experimental,'€ film festival programmer Adrian Jonathan Pasaribu says. '€œMany communities were trying, while before there were just only industrial documentaries and film school projects. Those were years of experimentation '€” of a naughty, fertile cinema. And 15 years later, nothing more has happened.'€

Pasaribu and his peers from the community of filmmakers and critics at Forum Lenteng are working to change that and will hold the inaugural Arkipel International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival from Aug. 24 to 30 at several venues around Jakarta.

The problem is that local filmmakers are too enamored with the talking heads and voice-of-god narration of Western television documentaries, according to Pasaribu, and are not thinking about how to use cheap and powerful digital cameras to tell Indonesian stories in a unique way.

To give local directors what Pasaribu described as '€œa spirit of ignition'€, the festival will present 75 alternative documentaries from 29 countries, including 10 from Indonesia. Twenty-two feature-length and short films will go head-to-head in Arkipel'€™s best-of-show competition.

'€˜Dongeng Rangkas'€™: Offers character portraits of two young men of the post-Reformation generation and their dreams of a better life.
Unusually, there will be no separate nods for long and short form works. '€œNot all stories need to be feature length,'€ Pasaribu says. Arkipel wants filmmakers to realize that storytelling formats should reflect the needs of the story '€” and not automatically push to make feature-length '€œprestige'€ projects.

The three local films in contention reflect this. For example, Canggung (The Awkward Moment), directed by Tunggul Banjaransari, offers what Pasaribu described as a daring 13-minute look at the '€œunspeakable'€ problems of a traditional Javanese family in Surakarta, Central Java. Told without narration, Canggung lets viewers develop their own views of the family based on gesture, what is said, and more importantly, what is left unsaid.

Up for its international premiere at the festival is Forum Lenteng'€™s fourth feature-length documentary, Elesan deq a Tutuq (The Unfinished Stream). The film, made in cooperation with local filmmakers trained by the forum, documents the travails of two generations of the Sasak community in Pemenang on Lombok Island.

The festival will also feature a screening of Anak Sabiran, Di Balik Cahaya Gemerlapan (Sang Arsip), a documentary about Misbach Yusa Biran, the founder of the nation'€™s beleaguered Sinematek film archive, in a program along with a presentation of Asrul Sani'€™s 1969 film Apa Jang Kau Tjari, Palupi? (What Are You Looking For, Palupi?).

Pasaribu said that the film, which depicts the troubled relationship of a poor-but-honest writer and his vivacious-but-profligate actress wife, perfectly captures the spirit of the early New Order '€” from its production design to the morality tale that plays out between the couple. '€œCulture is judged through cinema, through the films watched publicly,'€ Pasaribu says. Presenting Palupi again will underscore Misbach'€™s concerns about losing the past, he adds.

'€˜Negeri di Bawah Kabut'€™: The documentary takes an intimate look at family relations in Genikan, a remote mountain village on the slopes of Mt. Merbabu in Central Java.
On his picks for moviegoers, Pasaribu recommends The Suitcase and Love and Shame, an unconventional long-form doc from US director Jane Gillooly, which he says '€œmakes it'€™s own reality'€ using found objects and eBay purchases, among other things, to tell the true story of star-cross'€™d lovers in the 1960s. Also on his list is Russian Alexei Dmitriev'€™s brief doc Hermeneutics, which juxtaposes explosions from fireworks and war footage to jarringly surreal effect.

Notable foreign films to be shown include Le Jour A Vaincu La Nuit (The Day Has Conquered the Night) by Jean-Gabriel Périot from France, which offers a study of repetition and confession among a group of prison inmates, and Old Cinema, Bologna Melodrama from Italian Davide Rizzo, presenting a community'€™s personal reflections on the death of a local theater.

The party will not be limited to Jakarta, according to Pasaribu: A mini-version of the festival is slated to go Lombok by November and there is a chance that the road show will travel to Yogyakarta; Padang, West Sumatra; and Palu, Central Sulawesi '€” all places where Forum Lenteng has worked to train communities of local filmmakers.

The festival screens from Aug. 24 to 30 at the Kineforum and Teater Kecil at Taman Ismail Marzuki in Cikini, Central Jakarta; and the GoetheHaus and the Sinematek in South Jakarta. Most works will be subtitled in English. Visit arkipel.org for a schedule and program information. Admission is free.

'€” Photos courtesy of Arkipel