The lush invi­ta­tion was printed on a slightly yel­low tinted fancy paper; a squared thumb­nail posi­tioned in the cen­ter shows what looks like a movie poster with a snap­shot of 4 peo­ple, it reads:

‘Sepuluh’
sebuah film karya Henry Riady

(‘Ten’ a film by Henry Riady)

Elegant type­face was used to styl­ize the text, fur­ther uplift­ing the art-deco design that expresses lux­ury, rather than art. It was Trajan fam­ily, I believed, com­monly used by design­ers to replace the age-old Times New Roman on invi­ta­tions of such.

Crowds were seen all over the recep­tion area, glasses of white wine were neatly pre­pared on a table in the cor­ner of the entrance, com­pletely ignored by the loud chat­ters and ampli­fied speeches heard from the other room sep­a­rated by a pair of glass door. As we approach the room smiles were seen behind it in antic­i­pa­tion of our dis­tin­guished guest, one of the cab­i­net mem­bers expected to attend the launch party that night.

One par­tic­u­lar thing struck me as unusual that night, was the crowd.

Indonesia is a coun­try of movie lovers, we have one of the world’s best com­mer­cial cin­ema, high num­ber of intel­lec­tual & west­ern minded audi­ences, but unlike China or India, we have an extremely low num­ber of high qual­ity, locally pro­duced movie.

The quin­tes­sen­tial of the moviemak­ers in Indonesia can be any­one but batik (for­mal tra­di­tional cloth­ing pop­u­lar for social func­tions in the coun­try) wear­ers. It’s those jeans & shirts baby boomers, the me-don’t care bunch that crowds the lesser known moviemak­ing haven. Hardly ever some­one who comes with body­guards open­ing their doors and touch­ing their ear walk­ing like a ghost would inhabit such ecosys­tem. But the land­scape seen that night was a rare mix of crowds from both worlds with a dif­fer­ent kind of atmos­phere, like a bunch of Toms & Jerries min­gling together with dozens of Spikes, with no sign of the car­toon fights & barks.

Indonesia, a coun­try where fax is still com­monly used, and email’s more of a per­sonal gizmo, is a place of mailing-listers. The com­mu­nity skipped the news­groups rev­o­lu­tion and pro­pelled into a web rev­o­lu­tion in the late 90s, but con­tent never really caught up with the growth. That’s where mailing-list came in. Yahoo was, and still is the #1 por­tal in the coun­try, the direc­tory dri­ven web­site pro­vided the per­fect plat­form to bridge the peo­ple, the pri­vacy con­cern & the tech­no­log­i­cal gap. Typing con­tent was much eas­ier for peo­ple then to paste HTML for­mat their piece. Thus the pop­u­lar­ity of mail­ing list, as sim­ple as writ­ing a note, your mes­sage is heard by the hun­dreds, or thou­sands of sub­scribers of their Yahoo ‘milis’–as it often called by locals. You could find any kind of use­ful, stu­pid, pas­sion­ate & more hon­est infor­ma­tion in the milis for any sub­ject you’d like–more ubiq­ui­tous than any web­sites, books or mag­a­zines in the country.

I was a mem­ber of one par­tic­u­lar milis that fated me to sit together with a young lad named Edwin, in a warm cloudy day of 2007. His post in that milis caught my atten­tion; a link to his trailer of a movie his work­ing on called Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly. At the end of the note, he truth­fully signed off him­self as:

Edwin Babi.
(Edwin the Pig)

Edwin is a hum­ble guy in his mid 20s. His uncombed curvy hair com­fort­ably con­cealed his pim­ples around his fore­head & cheek. He tucked half of his grey shirt into his dark green khaki pants, and along with his friendly smile, he & his friend Meiske slowly walked towards our table. After a quick intro­duc­tion I was reminded that I met Meiske before that meet­ing, her fond mem­ory gen­tly reminded my igno­rance, so I decided to spend more time talk­ing to her about Edwin’s project, and lib­er­ated Edwin off my ques­tions that I’ve men­tally pre­pared, so he can enlighten my friends instead.

Edwin’s movie, ‘Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly’ is about iden­tity, in par­tic­u­lar, it’s about the chi­nese descent’s lin­ger­ing dilemma of their being a Chinese descent in a coun­try largely inhab­ited by Chinese & immi­grants; thanks to his­tory, it’s con­sid­ered taboo to sub­mit to being a Chinese descent in cer­tain period of time, or sur­round­ing, or some place.

By the time I met him, Edwin claimed the movie was 75% done, due to lim­ited bud­get & sup­port, he had to shoot the movie guerilla style, by a team of indie work­ers he recruited and signed on with­out any solid promise but shared pas­sion & com­mon resent­ment of their rejected efforts from the past.

Our meet­ing that day, in fact was one of such effort from Edwin & Co. to win sup­port from the other side of the wall, it is through dozens of such meet that they were able to raise enough fund & aware­ness about his projects, where peo­ple started donat­ing their wealth, net­works & equip­ments so that he can source the juice and kick-start the cre­ative engine run­ning. When fund dried up, he would stop pro­duc­tion, mark the scene, tick off the list of to-do until another oppor­tu­nity came and resume busi­ness till the last word of ‘cut!’ and ‘it’s a wrap!’ was sounded 20 months from the first shout of action! from Edwin.

After a short speech by my dis­tin­guished friend on-stage, we were escorted to the pre­mium located seat of the cold cin­ema, red-tape were ran around both sides of the lines of seats sig­nal­ing ‘VIP only’, a secu­rity guard loosen the tape and ges­tur­ing his hand point­ing towards the pre­de­fined seat, and the lady escort handed us a piece of printed paper, and a copy of what looks like a CD sleeve read­ing ‘Theatrical Trailer’. Skipping the usual show­case of com­mer­cials, the light grad­u­ally darken and pro­jected image started to show from the screen where some part of the cur­tain still cov­er­ing each cor­ner side of it, which means the movie was not in anamor­phic cin­e­matic ratio, asso­ci­ated with block­buster & high bud­geted hol­ly­wood flicks, yet a com­mon prac­tice of low-budgeted, locally pro­duced movies.

However, the col­ors of the image reflected on the screen was noth­ing like the usual sus­pects. The care­fully designed set & light­ing, along with the sharp lens, cam­era move­ment, clean sounds & sights were unlike other recent local movies that I’ve seen, it some­how shared the same pas­sion & ded­i­ca­tion as the lush invi­ta­tion & movie flyer that were given to us. This peo­ple were really seri­ous about mak­ing this movie a success.

The flyer opens with a sin­gle line of quote from Plato:

“Those who tell sto­ries rule the world”

Such a bold state­ment, I thought. Printed on the back side was the Indonesian ver­sion, read­ing both ver­sions, it felt like the piece was writ­ten as English and later trans­lated, this is odd con­sid­er­ing 1) the locale of the audi­ence 2) the mother tongue of the moviemak­ers, more­over, ss deep as the words and state­ments were, they seem to be lack­ing some orig­i­nal­ity, the writ­ten expres­sions seemed to be pro­ject­ing wis­dom beyond the leagues of the mind behind it.

Beneath the hon­or­able efforts from the tech­ni­cal side, the open­ing scene didn’t really strike me as some­thing notable in the movie ‘Sepuluh’, per­sua­sion from the caramel pop­corn was stronger for me to stay rather than the mediocre open­ing scene of a drug addict sell­ing his soul. The bril­liant cam­era & sound­work didn’t con­vince me either. I found myself walk­ing out from the the­atre 10 years later in the movie, about 10 min­utes out from the open­ing title.

Edwin’s Blind Pig didn’t quite make it to com­mer­cial cin­e­mas, it is mostly shown on pri­vate screen­ings in indie the­aters, groups of peo­ple, crit­ics, and even­tu­ally it landed on film fes­ti­vals, one such fes­ti­val was the 2009 International Film Festival in Rotterdam where it won a FIPRESCI award. Personally, the trailer was enough for me to urge myself to call the publicist/producer, my friend Meiske and find out their next screen­ing sched­ule in Jakarta. For those who are inter­ested, check out this page for the next screening.

It’s funny how two com­pletely dif­fer­ent souls, one hav­ing an army of help, with lim­it­less ammo, the other fight­ing guerilla style for the same war, try­ing to make a movie that appeals to audi­ence and well accepted. Further read­ing has it that the movie ‘Sepuluh’ was bud­geted way above the range of what is con­sid­ered rea­son­able; prob­a­bly the kind of cost a new­comer has to pay to attract such rep­utable names in filmmaking.

Closing Plato’s quote, the flyer stated that the num­ber of accep­tance was not the objec­tive, rather, it was the impact that it shall make–as intended by the cre­ator that was more impor­tant. Another bold state­ment that was worth men­tion­ing, a rarely seen wis­dom com­ing from a 19 year old led pro­duc­tion team.

At the end of the day, it’s not the end of the world for both Henry & Edwin, rather it’s a new begin­ning; for them both, and us wit­ness­ing such young souls leav­ing their foot­prints behind their fore­fa­thers, in a way that even their fathers never thought it would be, in a coun­try where film­mak­ing is not quite an estab­lished indus­try yet. It was all inspir­ing, each in a par­tic­u­lar way. Riady has shown us that money & power could buy us time but some­thing more is required in order to cre­ate some­thing that reflects great vision. For this both of them shall learn that noth­ing beats per­sis­tence & clar­ity to share one’s vision to the world.

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This note was first pub­lished on face­book by the author. Revision was made for rel­e­vance to cur­rent status.