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Forgotten auteurs : Rediscovering Ratna Asmara, Indonesia’s first female director
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Infront of the camera: Ratna Asmara, born Suratna, Indonesia’s first woman film director. (Photo undated)
(Archive/Photo undated)
H
aving directed multiple successful films alongside a rich acting, singing and traditional dance career in the 1940s through the 60s, Ratna Asmara, Indonesia’s first woman director, should be a celebrated figure. Why has her name been forgotten?
Few know about Indonesia’s first woman film director, Ratna Asmara. In the 1950s, Ratna directed films at a time when many famous women were in front of the camera worldwide, but very few had been celebrated for their work behind it.
In her films, Ratna brought to the big screen a nuanced and sensitive view of topics considered taboo in Indonesia at the time, including the trauma of Indonesian comfort women during the Japanese occupation, polygamy and structural poverty with some of the biggest names in the industry.
And yet, her story has been left in the shadows, diminishing in the same way analogue film diminishes as it ages.
It was the physical degradation and potential loss of Ratna’s films that drove a group of archivists, historians, and researchers Umi Lestari, Julita Pratiwi, Efi Sri Handayani, Imelda Taurina Mandala, Lisabona Rahman and the late Siti Anisah to come together in 2021 and, under their collective Kelas Liarsip, a virtual film study group, begin to preserve the history and works of Ratna, with the understanding that if action was not taken now, her name would be lost in the annals of history.
With its first film digitized, and a book on Ratna and the project now published, Kelas Liarsip hopes to widen the national canon to include more women and minority groups while spreading Ratna’s story.
