Shaping the Future

Are love stories beyond politics? Weaving together interviews with political prisoners detained after the 1965 anti-communist purge in Indonesia with footage from an unmade film about romance between communist cadres, Putu Kusuma Widjaja’s multifaceted docufiction assemblage interrogates the historical limits of an eternal sentiment.

In 2008, Putu Kusuma Widjaja videotaped journalist and dissident publisher Joesoef Isak about Eros Djarot’s upcoming film Lastri, a 1965-set romantic drama featuring a girl from Gerwani and a boy from the Consentrasi Gerakan Mahasiswa Indonesia (CGMI) – both groups associated with the banned Communist Party of Indonesia. Lastri, which would soon be shelved, its shooting disrupted by anti-communist groups, became an occasion for Isak to ruminate on the failure of Indonesia’s post-independence ideals, his ten-year imprisonment during Suharto’s authoritarian New Order regime and the country’s chequered relationship to democracy.

In Shaping the Future, Widjaja revisits this footage, entwining it with behind-the-scenes clips from the shooting of Lastri as well as contemporary interviews with two real-life members of Gerwani and the CGMI. Producing stunning clashes between documentary and fiction, and love and politics, this multilayered assemblage examines the ways in which history, popular myth and public memory interact with one another. Widjaja’s film poses a pointed question: is it possible to tell stories of the past when its spectres still haunt the present?