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Documentary festival highlights poverty, urban life in SE Asia
The second edition of the Chopshots Documentary International Film Festival is kicking off in Jakarta today, offering portraits of the rapidly urbanizing communities in Southeast Asia
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T
he second edition of the Chopshots Documentary International Film Festival is kicking off in Jakarta today, offering portraits of the rapidly urbanizing communities in Southeast Asia.
The six-day international festival will be screening 58 films, 29 of which are from the region. The films will feature a wide array of topics, from street life in Indonesia's large cities and Myanmar to the break-neck competition to become stars in South Korean pop industry.
Last year's Busan Film Festival champion, Jalanan (Streetside), a film that features the journey of three street performers from Jakarta, will open the festival on Tuesday.
'Jalanan is an important case study of how a documentary could reach a global audience. Another study case would be South Korea's Planet of Snail ' two films that are also featured in our DocNet Campus program,' said Chopshots' Managing Director Lulu Ratna.
Chopshots Documentary International Film Festival is a project supported by DocNet Southeast Asia, an initiative that aims to support documentary filmmaking in Southeast Asia and to professionalize and unite varied local initiatives and give a voice to those in the region that do not have avenue to express their views.
DocNet Campus is a program where some documentaries are used as study cases on how documentaries could reach a wider audience. 'That's why the program is also open to public,' Lulu said.
As one of the biggest documentary festivals in Asia, the biannual event will also award the best documentaries with a ¤10,000 (US$13,788) cash prize. In long documentary category, the festival has selected 12 entries, two of which are from Indonesia.
The first is Ariani Djalal's Die Before Blossom, an observational documentary about young Muslim girls growing up in Indonesia's middle class of today while the other is Ismail Fahmi Lubish's Masked Monkey ' The Evolution of Darwin Theory, a film that satirizes both Darwinian theory of evolution and the habits of contemporary living in Jakarta through an analysis of the monkey puppet show, which is a popular form of entertainment in Jakarta.
'Despite the festival's focus on developing documentaries in Southeast Asia, the international competition will also address the quality of documentaries currently circulating around internationally. This is also to give the Southeast Asian documentary filmmakers a chance to compete on an international level,' said Lulu.
Six films among the competitors are from the region, including Thailand's By the River, Cambodia's The Last Refuge, Vietnam's Madam Phung's Last Journey and the Philippines' War is a Tender Thing.
In voicing the concerns of Southeast Asian documentary filmmakers, Chopshots revolves its program around the theme-centered story of each region. 'Myanmar's filmmakers, for example, are mostly disturbed by the contemporary life in today's urban Myanmar. This gives alternative views that the important issues in Myanmar today are not only the ones regarding the military dictatorship, but also about other issues,' Lulu continued.
Another showcased program is of a project named Why Poverty?, an initiative to audio-visually portray the issue of poverty worldwide. Eight of the project's productions will be showcased before a public lecture held by the producer of Why Poverty?.
