Coming from poor families, five teenagers worry about their future as they graduate from junior high school. They will compete with thousands of other students in a series of examination to win scholarships to further their education.
Nia Dinata’s third documentary film, Mengejar Impian, or The Pursuit of Dream, tells the true story of five teenagers from different cities in East Java, who compete for scholarships at a prestigious senior high school.
Nuning, Tika, Cahya, Aang and Rahmatillah are 9th grade students who have one thing in common: they are all from poor families.
They accept their condition and try hard to win scholarships in the hopes that they can eventually make better lives for their families.
A scene from the documentary Mengejar Impian (the pursuit of dream). courtesy of Kalyana Shira
The students are just five of the 3,015 applicants who are studying hard to win the scholarships. The five have high hopes to get a seat at SMA 10 senior high school in Malang, East Java — an international-standard pilot project (RSBI) boarding school that offers full scholarships.
Many parents from low income families will not send their children to private schools or RSBI public schools due to high tuition. But SMA 10, funded by the Putera Sampoerna Foundation, gave the students a chance to achieve their dreams through a scholarship scheme.
For Rahmatillah, who comes from Sapudi, a remote island east of Madura, it is a great opportunity. That is why she braved a tiring 11-hour-trip on a small ship and three buses to reach Malang for the entrance test.
Nuning, who lives in a very small house with her family and helps her father to sell snacks after school, dreams of becoming a lecturer. The humorous plump girl racked up a perfect score on the national math examination.
Aang might have no chance to realize his dream of becoming a diplomat without the scholarship. His mother, a single parent, can’t afford to send him to a senior high school.
Cahya, whose family scavenges to make ends meet, wants to become a doctor. Meanwhile, Tika, the daughter of a security guard, wants to become a businesswoman.
Nia said she chose the five students after learning that their great potential might be wasted simply due to financial problems. “There is no manipulation in this film. I just followed their daily lives and filmed them as they were,” she said t the premiere of the film on Tuesday.
Shot over July and August, the documentary film portrays the hard facts about the widening gap in access to education in the country. In the 47-minute documentary, Nia highlights the financial hurdles that often forces bright students from low income families to choose medieval schools or even abandon their dreams.
Ultimately, only 150 students secured scholarships, to the greatly disappointment of the remaining 2,865 applicants.
Sadly, one of the five teenagers in the documentary film failed in the second stage of the selection process.
“This film only shows the tip of the iceberg. There are many students out there who are as smart and talented as the students who won the scholarships, but they cannot get the same opportunity due to limited funding,” said Nia, who also founded the Kalyana Shira Foundation.
Nenny Soemawinata, the managing director of Putera Sampoerna Foundation, said the documentary would be screened in cultural centers and universities and schools in seven cities, including Jakarta and Yogyakarta.
