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The filmmaker who uses comedy to tell tragedies
Filmmaker Winner Wijaya explores tragedies through a comedic lens.
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eaths and funerals are strange. No one seems to know what to do or say. When my mother passed away a couple of years ago, I found that the emotions didn’t really hit right away. Instead, they crept up in the midst of taking care of funeral arrangements, picking out the casket or talking to the visitors at the funeral home. Every conversation felt a bit awkward, if not downright exhausting.
The short film Turut Berduka Cita (Deep Condolences) explores the absurdities that often take place in such situations. Maria (Diana Valencia), the lead character, finds herself having to constantly recount the chronology of her father’s death to visitors at the funeral home, only to be met with odd, casual remarks and inappropriate anecdotes about the deceased.
In one scene, after Maria’s explains how her father passed away – of heart disease – a woman casually asks, “Did your father smoke? He probably didn’t watch what he ate, did he?”
When Maria says her father enjoyed Padang cuisine – famous for its flavor but also its fattiness – the same woman blurts out that Padang food is evil before turning to the man next to her – presumably her husband – and telling him to stop eating it.
In another scene, an uncle remarks that Maria’s father should have had bypass surgery done in Singapore instead of Penang because of its “superior technology”. His wife adds that herbal medicines did wonders for her family and that Maria’s father should have looked into them. To top it off, she warns Maria about the dangers of modern medicine due to its “chemical nature”.
“During the shoot, I purposely tired myself out by drinking tons of coffee and staying up late so I’d look tired. I also tried to remember the moments when my grandmother passed away,” said Diana, who is 23.
Almost all the lines in the movie are based on real experiences. Director Winner Wijaya, 25, said the idea for the movie came to him after he attended a funeral of a friend’s loved one. He noticed how strange it was to see people casually offering their condolences – with smiles on their faces. Some time later, that very same friend ended up telling the Malang-born director about all the ridiculous things said to her during the funeral, many of which made it into the movie’s script.
This bizarre dialogue is what makes Turut Berduka Cita so compelling. The encounters are awkward and hilarious but never forced or ill-willed. And more importantly, it’s very relatable for a lot of people who have been to funerals in Indonesia – specifically Christian funerals, as Muslim funerals require the deceased to be buried as soon as possible, typically within a day.
In the comments section of the movie on YouTube and Winner’s Twitter post on the film, hundreds of people have shared their own funeral experiences and have debated the “right etiquette” under the circumstances, much to the disdain of Winner who claims he did not make Turut Berduka Cita as a critique of the guests portrayed in his movie. “Grief is complicated. We can’t say what’s right or wrong,” he said, “No one knows what to do in these situations.”
Beyond all the absurdities and dark comedy, Turut Berduka Cita manages to showcase just how weird and taxing mourning can be for the family of the deceased. When one is constantly forced to recount chronologies or is asked the same questions over and over again, eventually the answers become a routine, devoid of meaning and emotion. As the movie progresses, the lead character Maria starts to look disheveled and disconnected. After all the guests leave, she finally breaks down and cries. It’s a powerful scene that struck a chord with me – and most likely anyone who has lost someone close to them.
A different approach to tragedies
Turut Berduka Cita isn’t the first film where young Winner has used absurdities and comedy to tell a tragic story.
In 2017, he released Ojek Lusi, a short documentary on motorcycle taxi drivers operating at the site of the Lapindo mud flow in Sidoarjo, East Java. The drivers sell DVDs and offer tours to tourists as a way to survive and make a living.
The Lapindo mud flow was the result of a mud volcano eruption caused by gas drilling by PT Lapindo Brantas in 2006. The mud submerged at least 16 villages, and many victims have yet to receive compensation for the losses of their homes. The ojek drivers are some of them.
Much like Turut Berduka Cita, Ojek Lusi isn’t interested in being objective. It takes a specific point of view, in this case that of the ojek drivers, and tells the story from their perspectives as normal human beings. Winner and his team followed the daily lives of these drivers and presented them as they were, with no script or acting, something that other media treating the subject apparently failed to do.
When Winner met the Sidoarjo drivers for the first time, he was asked if he needed someone to cry in front of the camera for dramatization, something that had been requested by other media outlets when covering the Lapindo story. “We were the first ones to film their actual lives,” Winner said, “I wanted to show them not merely as victims of Lapindo but people who joke around, like fishing, have a family, children and grandchildren.”
Comedy as the key
At a relatively young age, Winner Wijaya has won countless awards and has been nominated by national and foreign film festivals for his work. At the moment, he is preparing his first full-length feature, a part-biographical, part-fictional film about a former political prisoner from 1965 who is also a witty artist recounting his life.
Winner tackles another heavy subject using the same ingredient: comedy. Raised in a family that didn’t take themselves too seriously, Winner took to comedy at a young age. These sensibilities shine through in his work.
The director strongly believes that approaching tragedy through comedy is the best way to spur people to think and to empathize with his characters. “When a film about a tragedy focuses on the victims and their suffering, I think that’s exploiting sadness,” Winner said, “With comedy, you put the subjects of the movie and the audience on the same level.”
In Turut Berduka Cita, Winner uses comedy to show the resilience of the friend on whom the movie is based. “Even though it’s tragic that her father passed away, she was able to tell her stories and express herself humorously,” Winner said, “That means she had passed her sadness – that she was not shackled by her pain.”
“That’s kind of the point of the movie.”
