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Millennials take on humanity at short film fest
A recent awards night for a short film competition showed that while millennials might act differently toward the world compared to previous generations, they have not lost their sense of humanity and empathy.
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A recent awards night for a short film competition showed that while millennials might act differently toward the world compared to previous generations, they have not lost their sense of humanity and empathy. (Shutterstock, Inc./AllaSaa )
O
lder generations often perceive millennials with a high degree of cynicism. It is easy to see why. Millennials, a generation of people who reached adulthood in the early 21st century, spend most of their time glued to gadgets, updating their social media statuses and developing narcissistic obsessions about themselves.
To the older generations, they are selfish, lazy and ignorant, or may even be considered to have lost a lot of sense of humanity.
However, are such perceptions justified or are they only assumptions by closed-minded people who have passed their golden age of opportunity and blame their failures on the youth?
A recent awards night for a short film competition showed that while millennials might act differently toward the world compared to previous generations, they have not lost their sense of humanity and empathy.
The competition, called the 2016 Indonesian Short Film Festival, was organized by Kompas TV and offered awards in two categories — high school and university. Judges in the competition picked 10 winners who took on the theme of humanism. All of the films were produced and filmed by millennials from 10 cities across the archipelago. The winners were chosen from 276 entries submitted to the competition organizer between October and December last year. The head of the judging panel, Makbul Mubarak, said the selected movies were chosen because they all had strong messages of humanity. “We did not only judge based on technical superiority,” Makbul said. Makbul’s statement was clearly evident in the high school category. The selected movies in the category mostly had amateurish screenplays, straightforward plots and bad acting. However, despite these limitations, the movies showcased interesting and refreshing stories. All of the winners in the high school category were produced and filmed by high school students outside of Jakarta. Therefore, all of them provided a unique way of thinking and perceptions about humanism.
(Read also: How millennial parents are creating tongue-twisting names for their children)
Among the finalists was a film called Dua Hari (Two Days) from a senior high school in Muara Enim, Palembang. It conveyed an interesting take on tolerance and integrity through the eyes of its character, a Christian teenage girl of Chinese descent from Jakarta who spends time at a new Muslim-dominated public high school in a remote region.
The first prize winner in the high school category was Izinkan Saya Menikahinya (Allow Me to Marry Her) from Rembang senior high school in Purbalingga, East Java. This movie showed both technical superiority and a compelling story but its winning factor lay in its end credits.
During the credits, the filmmakers gave thanks to victims of the 1965 communist purge and genocide. It turned out that the story in the movie, which is about a military officer who cannot get permission from his superior to marry his girlfriend, was based on true events in 1965.
Nur Muhammad Iskandar, a local film community activist who mentored the Rembang students during the filming, said the movie was based on a previous documentary that was also made by the students.
“In the documentary, the students interviewed a number of ex-military personnel from the Tjakrabirawa unit, which was allegedly involved in the 1965 abductions. One of them told a story about his grandson who could not get married because of his status as the descendant of a communist sympathizer,” Iskandar said.
“From that documentary, we then had the idea to create a short fiction [movie].”
Meanwhile, the selected films in the university category were the complete opposite of those in the high school category.
The films in the university student category were mostly from Jakarta. They displayed more advanced technical superiority, such as a short animated movie titled Different from Bina Nusantara University.
(Read also: Underrated Disney animated movies you should watch)
Despite the technical superiority, stories and ideas, the winning films from the university student category felt less refreshing than those created by the high school students.
The films tended to try too hard to look smart and eclectic. The issues and themes that they raised also felt far less original than the ones in the school category.
The majority of the movies from the university students took on the issue of social media and gadget dependency, something that the filmmakers might be familiar with, yet the way the issues were presented was not compelling enough to make them memorable.
The first prize winner in the university category was I Love Me from students of the Jakarta Arts Institute (IKJ) and it was one of many short films that raised issues on egoism and narcissism arising from gadget usage, with a familiar narrative of a young adult being trapped in her own social media realm.
A member of the judging panel, Ifa Isfansyah, said the fact that high school students from regions could offer far more refreshing stories than university students living in Jakarta was normal and was part of the development process for all the filmmakers.
“High school students tend to have more original ideas because they are less influenced by other filmmakers. Meanwhile, university students have more access to references and therefore, they have the tendency to want to look and feel like something else,” Ifa said.
“That is just a process. In the long run, each filmmaker will find his or her own style.”
