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Dirmawan Hatta: Making statements through motion pictures
(Courtesy of Dirmawan Hatta)In an age where filmmaking technology has become so advanced and easily accessed by people, one crucial question remains
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(Courtesy of Dirmawan Hatta) (Courtesy of Dirmawan Hatta)
(Courtesy of Dirmawan Hatta)
In an age where filmmaking technology has become so advanced and easily accessed by people, one crucial question remains.
According to filmmaker Dirmawan Hatta, the question is posed to film creators: What statement do you want to make?
Although filmmaking is one of the most recent forms of art, with it only beginning in the 1890s, it has very rapidly developed.
'Making movies used to be an exclusive field because it was expensive to acquire the equipment and more expensive to acquire the skills. But now making films is very easy. Technological improvements have made filmmaking cheaper and cheaper,' he says.
'But as it is easier to produce film, the question of what we want to do with film arises. What do you want to say with your work? What will set you apart from other filmmakers? These questions are now more important than ever for filmmakers.'
The 39-year-old filmmaker had made his name on the Indonesian movie scene by writing screenplays for feature films May (released in 2008), King (2009), The Mirror Never Lies (2011) and Keumala (2012).
Co-writing the script with The Mirror's director Kamila Andini, Hatta was nominated for Best Screenplay at the 2011 Indonesian Film Festival (FFI).
In the past two years, he has also been known as feature film director with spiritual drama Optatissimus (2013) and art house drama Toilet Blues (July 2014) ' for both of which he also wrote the screenplay.
'I started making movies during my years as a college student at Yogyakarta-based Gadjah Mada University in the mid 1990's. I was a member and manager of a cinema club on campus,' Hatta says.
He entered the university's Social and Political Faculty in 1994, a period he described as 'the ascent of Indonesian students' political movement' prior to the popular protest that dethroned Soeharto in 1998.
'Students were very active then. We joined discussions, protested and created artwork. It was a crazy time for me as a student,' Hatta said.
It was also during his time as a student that Hatta joined Teater Garasi ' a theater group that would later grow into one of the most prominent institutions on Indonesian contemporary art scene.
'It was with them that I got to explore literature, music and film,' he said.
In 2000, Hatta started to make a personal documentary titled Orang-orang Merah Jambu (The House of the Pink People), which was intended to look into the unique relationship between people of different social classes in his grandmother's family in his hometown in Magelang, Central Java.
Throughout the better part of 2000's, he was taken under the wing of senior filmmaker Garin Nugroho and his Sains Estetika Teknologi (SET) institution.
'I learned a lot from Mas Garin; I also got yelled at a lot,' Hatta said with a laugh. With SET, he continued making documentaries and several public service announcement videos.
He then worked on two more documentaries: Dongeng Negeri Seluar Peta (also titled as Pomatodon: of the tree and off-the-map Land) and Kerudung Shanty (Shanty's Veil).
The former is about the Tidung and Agabag aboriginal communities who dwell on the banks of the Sembakung River in East Kalimantan and their struggle with the changing climate and deforestation. The latter is about a qasidah (traditional Islamic music) singer who traded her veils for wigs and skimpy dresses to become a dangdut singer.
The transition between directing documentaries and directing fiction feature films, according to Hatta, was very easy.
'I don't see much difference between documentary and fiction. They both have stories; they both have points of view. They're really not that different,' he said.
As a filmmaker, Hatta said he wanted to make testimonies.
'Indonesia is a fantastic country. It has fantastic resources and fantastic natural beauty. But at the same time its problems are horrendous ' horrendous poverty, horrendous traffic jams, horrendous inability to make use of all the potential,' he says.
'This angers me. I want to do something. If I can't change this, then at least I can testify about all this nonsense and record it in history.'
