A child walks into a half-abandoned city with half-crumbling skyscrapers and gardens half-turned into deserts. The child, a twelve-year-old boy in sturdy hiking boots and a hydration pack, with tears pooling in his eyes and blisters on his feet, arrives in the city near midnight, and because of that … [Read more...]
Writings
The Last Supper
Lia Tjokro shares a poignant tale featuring love and loss, making a reader go through a roller-coaster of emotions. It was a night when the stars hid behind the bulbous stormclouds and the nocturnal insects were silent. The eerie shadow and protruding branches of the frangipani trees that lined … [Read more...]
The Long March
Joko makes his way through a massive crowd of students out on the yard of the high-walled campus on Jalan Ahmad Yani. The sun is pale against the metallic sky and the city is brimming with heat and exhaust fumes. It is not yet eight in the morning. He finds Mara somewhere at the back of the crowd, … [Read more...]
The Look of Silence and Indonesia’s dark mirror
With eyes fixed on his television screen, Adi Rukun, the main character followed by documentary maker Joshua Oppenheimer in his new film, The Look Of Silence, seems to face a mirror that resurrects a nightmarish past. In the footage that he is watching, two old men sit by the bank of the Snake … [Read more...]
The murder of Affan Kurniawan
Affan Kurniawan, a twenty-one-year-old motorcycle taxi rider, was working in Jakarta when he was struck by an armoured vehicle belonging to the Mobile Brigade Corps, an elite unit of the Indonesian National Police. The vehicle, weighing several tons, didn’t even try to avoid him; footage that … [Read more...]
