L

ove or fear?

Young aspiring director Sammaria Simanjuntak courageously chooses the first because she knows that it is the right thing to do.

The director of Cin(T)a, one of the first Indonesian movies to take on the sensitive issue of pluralism from a romantic perspective, shared her profound philosophy of life in a recent interview with The Jakarta Post.

According to the 28-year-old, there are two reasons for people to live — either for love or for fear.

“If you choose fear, you definitely take the wrong direction. You have to pick love,” remarked the cheerful lady.

Sammaria doesn’t only preach. The good advice is a result of her own life experience. The short-haired woman has been applying the principle when it comes to making life decisions. Every time she chooses love she feels she is making the right decision.

Sammaria knew it was the right thing to do when she decided to drop her career as an architect to follow her passion for film.

The architecture graduate from the Bandung Institute of Technology was sure that she was meant for film after she was involved in the making of a short film in 2006 with her college peers.

Sammaria said she knew she wanted to become a filmmaker after experiencing what she called “a three-second divine moment” during the screening of her first movie on campus.

“I instantly knew that I wanted to do this all my life for that three seconds,” she said.

Despite the calling, Sammaria decided to go in another direction, followed her fear and ended up working as an architect in Singapore.

“I was afraid, afraid of not earning money,” said the once straight-A student.

But Sammaria knew it was not the right decision from the start.

One year later, when Sammaria finally had the courage to leave the job and pursue her goal, she was forced to return to Indonesia due to a work permit issue.

“I applied for a job at an advertising company, following in the footsteps of my favorite director, Yasmin Ahmad, who worked at an ad agency. Because I thought this is one step closer to moviemaking,” she said.

Unfortunately, her visa was denied and she had to return to Indonesia immediately.

Sammaria once labeled her return to Indonesia as the saddest moment in her life, causing her to cry endlessly, but now she calls the incident “the best thing that ever happened” to her.

It was during that jobless moment that Sammaria finally decided to take a bold step and follow her passion for moviemaking by writing the script for Cin(T)a and directing the film, which surprisingly got a good public response.

“I never expected that people would watch [the film], actually I didn’t believe it myself that people would love it,” said the woman, who developed her film passion from her photography hobby.

But, exceeding her expectations, the feature was well received by Indonesian audiences. The indie movie, which tells the story of a couple in an interfaith relationship, is considered an achievement for a film made under a tight budget by an amateur director.

But Sammaria is not an amateur filmmaker anymore. The 2009 Indonesian Film Festival granted her the best screenplay award for her directorial debut. She has produced a number of head-turning films and documentaries, including the recent short 7 Deadly Kisses, which took her all the way to Germany to participate in the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year.

Her next project is a feature titled Demi Ucok (For the Sake of Ucok).

Even though the upcoming movie is less serious than the previous one, they share the same thing in adapting the director’s life to the screen.

While Cin(T)a explores Sammaria’s personal anxiety about religion and race division in society as a woman who was raised in different cities in Indonesia and encountered diversity in many places, the second film adopts the director’s love/hate relationship with her mother.

Demi Ucok tells the story of Glo, a Batak girl who wants to make films but has challenges from her mother, Mak Gondut, played by Sammaria’s own mother, who wants her daughter to get married.

“In Cin(T)a there is a little bit of me, but this time there is a lot of me,” she said.

Sammaria said the decision to include her own mother in the cast was made after giving it a lot of thought, knowing her mother was not an easy person to work with.

In the end, she chose love over fear and asked her mother to be in her movie.

But it was the right thing to do, as her mother, who steals the show in the romantic comedy, has landed another film project in which the daughter and mother reunite. The detective comedy Curious Grandmas: The Murder of Annet Van Houten is being pitched at the 2012 The Hong Kong Asia Film Financing Forum for production funding.

Despite all her success at filmmaking, Sammaria refused to be called a filmmaker. She sees herself as a storyteller that chose film as her medium.

“Film is only a medium. The important thing is what you want to say and what you want to ask,” she said.

However, it seems her latest movie is more than just a movie, as she has also initiated a unique way of fundraising for her film’s distribution.

She aims to get 10,000 co-producers to give Rp 100,000 (US$10.90) each, so Rp 1 billion will be collected to get the film into the major cinema network.

But that is not an easy task. From the September target, the production team has so far collected funds from less than 800 co-producers.

Sammaria finds the figure discouraging but refuses to give up and continues to move forward.

She and her team share the same belief that films are not just movies, but also a movement that may pave the way for local filmmakers to produce and distribute their own works.

Many have doubted Sammaria’s campaign and she confessed she is sometimes fearful of not meeting the target, but she once again refuses to succumb to her fears and continues to feel optimistic about the project for the sake of her love for the film.

To support and fund Sammaria’s film Demi Ucok, please visit www.demiapa.com.