Aceh reconstruction spotlighted in 'Playing Between Elephants'

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Sun, 07/29/2007 12:10 PM  |  Life

Lisabona Rahman, Contributor, Jakarta

Rebuilding a house in post-tsunami Aceh brings into play the whole world: the house owners concerned, the village chief, Indonesian aid workers and the UN, as shown in director Aryo Danusiri's first feature-length documentary Playing Between Elephants.

The film very intimately shows how complicated it is to survive a traumatic event and then experience global intervention.

It is about an international body that is assigned to build houses, while the people need to rebuild their homes.

The film takes us to meet Geuchik Abdurrahman, young village chief of East Geunting, who strives to balance contesting demands and principles.

It subtly, yet compellingly shows the fears as well as the lives involved in the reconstruction of post-tsunami Aceh.

The Jakarta Post: How did you work with the people of East Geunting?

Aryo: I put forward the idea that reconstruction is not just a physical but also a cultural process.

At the time I started shooting (a year after the tsunami), there was so much money involved for reconstruction but criticism arose about how slowly the process was going.

I became closer to Geuchik and more involved in the daily problems of reconstruction in the village. I learned things like why people did not agree with the decision to use concrete roofs as suggested by UN Habitat.

From the UN's perspective it was better because the material was cheaper. Local people, though, were still fearful about having heavy concrete above their heads (after what happened during the pre-tsunami earthquake) and felt safer with wooden roofs.

How long did filming take?

I began shooting in mid-December 2005 and stayed in Aceh until August 2006. It was an interesting experience for me to design the documentation of such a process and I would like it to be a film from which we learn many lessons.

Such as?

You need to be very careful when adopting community-driven, participatory approaches.

With such as approach we let the community decide what to do, and to what end. We had to pay attention to differences in values.

In this process, the new houses are designed to be earthquake-resistant; the community didn't make that decision. So that element could not be thought of as community-driven.

In this instance an international organization is proposing a new standard for housing that might not have been considered important by the community before.

The decision about what values to apply in the whole process needs to be handled very carefully as it involves basic values in the community's culture.

The building of houses isn't simply reconstruction but also the re-engineering of a society. I think this is the key issue that has to be considered, while it's the complexities that slow down the process.

Who's ""playing between elephants"" here?

In a way we all are: not only the village chief, the residents, but also the UN people, their facilitators and even I. We are all negotiating our place between conflicting currents.

The days of opening a bank account and celebration of the first stone in a reconstruction project mark the transition of the villagers to a more global world.

I was intrigued to experience the day I was at the bank with people from the village and they used fingerprints instead of a signature on documents.

Of course it said a lot about how unfair are development and access to education in Indonesia.

But I also was convinced that so many different aspects of world civilization can coexist in such a way, contradicting the prevailing belief that some societies are living a cultural and technological paradox.

They are not: Online banking, foreign aid and cell phones with cameras are as much part of their lives as fingerprints, religious beliefs and their great oral tradition.

They continuously reconcile many things in life and have become ""hybrids"", finding their place between the many great forces of their time.

Playing Between Elephants will have its world premiere at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in mid-October, followed by an Indonesian release in Jakarta the same month.

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