Everything You Always Wanted to Happen in the Bumi Manusia Film* (*but Were Afraid to Ask)

The wait is, finally, almost over. The film adaptation of Pramoedya Ananta Toer's classic novel "Bumi Manusia," or This Earth of Mankind, gets its red carpet première in Surabaya today. The choice of the première location was dictated by the fact that most of the novel is set in Wonokromo on the outskirts of the East Java capital in the late 19th century. The novel is the legendary leftist author's ambitious project to trace the birth of nationalism in Indonesia. It's also a real page-turner featuring a tragic love story between the protagonist Minke – a fictionalized version of Tirto Adhi Soerjo, the "father of Indonesian journalism" – and his beautiful half-Dutch, half-Javanese wife Annelies.