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oung Indonesian filmmaker Wregas Bhanuteja has become the first-ever Indonesian to win a Cannes Film Festival award after his short film, Prenjak/In The Year Of The Monkey, won the coveted Leica Cine Discovery prize at the prestigious festival in France.

Previous contenders from Indonesia have included such big names as Garin Nugroho and Eros Djarot, as well as Edwin and Lucky Kuswandi, whose films have been nominated in the competition for different categories but which failed to bag any prizes.

Wregas, 23, shared the great news on his Facebook account. “This award is for all of you,” Wregas wrote.

Behind Prenjak is Wregas and his high school buddies, who were all born in the Year of the Monkey 23 years ago.

“On New Year’s Day this year, we swore that anything we did this year would be something big,” Hosea Athanasius Mradipto Hatmaji, Prenjak’s unit production manager, told The Jakarta Post, on Friday.

Starting with this belief, Wregas gathered Hosea and his other friends in Yogyakarta — a city in which they met for the first time as high-school students — to establish film and art space Studio Batu in Sosrowijayan.

There, they eventually came up with the idea of interpreting a local cultural practice dating back to the 1980s through Prenjak — which is the Indonesian name for the bar-winged prinia bird.

Wregas and friends started filming Prenjak in February in Yogyakarta. It took only two days to shoot the film due to their tight work and study schedules in different cities and even overseas. Three days before the close of registration, the Prenjak team finally decided to submit the project to the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, which was no surprise really as the name of the star-studded event had been written in big bold letters on Studio Batu’s wall from the very beginning.

The 12-minute Prenjak centers around widow Diah, who offers a single matchstick for Rp 10,000 (73 US cents) to a man, named Jarwo, during her lunch break from work. In the transaction, Diah allows Jarwo to light the match in order to take a peek at what’s under Diah’s dress.

“Why is Diah so desperate for the money? Well, you have to find out the answer for yourself by watching the film,” said Wregas, who was last year involved in the country’s much-anticipated romance flick Ada Apa Dengan Cinta? 2 (What’s Up With Cinta? 2) created by prominent film makers Mira Lesmana and Riri Riza.

Along with Ada Apa Dengan Cinta? 2 Wregas was also involved in the production of Sokola Rimba (Jungle School), which was also made by the dynamic producer-director duo of Mira and Riri. Before Prenjak, Wregas and the Studio Batu team created several films, including Lembusura and The Floating Chopin, which were entered in international short-movie competitions in Berlin and Hong Kong earlier this year.

Prenjak is one of two Indonesian movies at Cannes this year. The other movie is thriller-drama Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts, directed by Mouly Surya.