The Myriad of Faces of the Future Challengers

An essayistic film exploring the legacies of cinema in New Order Indonesia and what it means to be inheritors of its filmic language.

Suharto’s self-proclaimed New Order government (1966–98) was characterised by intense political suppression and censorship. As a result, cinema became a vehicle for state ideologies. This film foregrounds the recurrence of prosaic shots of everyday life and patterns of narration in films of that era to draw new interpretations and meanings, thus providing an alternative reading of the New Order regime.

Splicing together lo-fi film footage culled online, the film recontextualises scenes and overturns the political subtexts of the regime as resistance against authoritarianism. As the filmmakers say, “Interpreting is an act of citizen participation.”