Yuki Aditya

Collective: an interview with Yuki Aditya (October 2025)

Yuki: Indonesians pushed out two presidents with social movements, the first in 1966, the second in 1998. But the revolutions were never finished. There was no collective ready to occupy the government. On the cultural side, we don’t have decent arts funding, a decent museum, film school or art school. But Indonesia’s lack of infrastructure became a loophole for us. Forum Lenteng wanted to offer what was not available in arts and educational infrastructure. The collective is an alternative learning space.

Collectives in Indonesia are very different from international film collectives like Godard’s Dziga Vertov Group in the 1970s or Chris Marker and the Medvedkin Group (1967-71). They spoke about fighting against a common enemy—the government, mainstream cinema, the war in Vietnam. In the western hemisphere collectives don’t endure—when the enemies step down they disperse. But here, we are just hanging out together. This is a region where you can meet friends 365 days per year. Being in a collective is in our blood. This is farmer’s land. II’s not only about fighting against something, it’s making something with friends (also helping your friends without expecting something in return just because they are your friends). Being together.

I’ve lived at Forum Lenteng for five years. There are ten others here. We have meals together. Four years ago we received an infrastructure grant to buy land; we designed the building and then oversaw its construction. We are on the very outskirts of the city of Jakarta, 100 meters from here is the next province. Public transportation is good, we’re close to the train station.

Mike: Power and culture was centered in Jakarta by the Dutch colonizers, is that still the case?

Yuki: We are an archipelago of 17,000 islands. But if you look at the history of cinema in Indonesia during the 1970s and 80s, Jakarta was the centre of everything. Most culture came from Java, the most populated island. But today, in terms of social media and Web 4.0, people don’t feel like they have to go to Java to be famous, or to become something else. The government moved our capital city to another island, and infrastructure is becoming more evenly distributed. Of course our bureaucracy is still very corrupt. But new laws for arts and culture created access to public funding with travel and production grants.

One year after the Lumiére brothers showed their first films, in 1895, cinema arrived in Indonesia (or the archipelago, because Indonesia proclaimed the independence in 1945, before then it was consisted of several kingdoms). The camera came here as a commodity, a tool, a technology. But not the discourse behind its development.

We have a verbal culture, most of our history was written by the Dutch until we fought for independence. Globally, documentary was always related to technological development. Before 1998, we knew documentary only as government propaganda, or what appeared on TV.

Filmmaking began in Indonesia through colonization by the Dutch. Back then there was no Indonesia of course. Many filmmakers learned their craft during the 1942-45 Japanese occupation. In 1945 Indonesia won its independence. The terms “documentary” and “experimental” barely existed in Indonesia before our ARKIPEL International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival. Before 1998 there were several people making experimental films, but one by one. Though it was impossible to show in public before going through the censor board.

Cinema history in Indonesia is always related to the socio-political situation. 1998 was a turning point, after Suharto, the second president, was pushed out by a large social movement. He had been in power for 32 years, with a lot of repression and strict censorship. The government knew they had to control everything audio-visual. Scripts had to be submitted before shooting. From 1966-88 films were made by big production houses. They made Americanized formula films. There was no experimental or underground film scene.

I’ve been with the ARKIPEL Festival since it started in 2013. I was the first director. Back then I wasn’t even studying cinema, I was a public accountant who was passionate about cinema. I worked close by Forum Lenteng, so it was easy to attend their weekly film series Monday World Cinema.

As part of a film criticism workshop, I was asked to interview someone from Forum Lenting. I arranged a meeting with Hafiz Rancajale, the chairperson at that time. We talked for five hours. For a decade Hafiz had been the director of OK.video/Jakarta International Video Festival (begun in 2003 by ruangrupa, a contemporary arts org). Hafiz asked me, “How about we make a film festival? And you be the director.” I resigned as public accountant and joined Forum Lenteng.

Hafiz had experience with festivals, how to get funding and build networks. I only knew how to watch films. I knew the history of cinema in the west religiously, by heart, anything made before the 1970s. Film festivals in Indonesia were red carpet celebrations, screening films shown in Berlin, Venice, Cannes. Curated film programming barely existed. Forum Lenteng was founded in 2003, nine years before I came. They had always wanted to organize a festival, which they saw as an act of criticism.

The main goal was how to amplify socio-political issues using cinema. How to produce and distribute knowledge through film festivals. For the festival we didn’t want to adapt ideas of experimental cinema from the west, formalisms from Europe and North America. We wanted to expand the definition of both documentary and experimental.

Mike: How many are involved with the festival?

Yuki: We have more than 800 submissions for the festival. It takes energy because we don’t have a big team. There are seven of us looking. We choose selectors from the workshop. The festival uses only one screening room and one exhibition room in the National Museum. We don’t want to make a big festival with several venues. We tried it once in 2015 with seven venues all screening films at the same time but didn’t feel good about it. Benjamin Cook (ex-director of Lux Moving Image) said the future of experimental film may be in Indonesia or southeast Asia, they had never seen a working method like ours. But this should be accompanied by no more than two screening venues so you can really talk to people. In bigger festivals you mostly meet people who want to sell something to you.

Apart from the festival we also run curated programs. We show fiction, documentary and experimental works. This year we did two programs. In the first four months of the year Hafiz and I curated a program of Indian films from 1940-1990. They made amazing experimental films in the 1960s and 70s.

After that we had a program called People Power Mixtapes. It’s about social movements around the world. The title is derived from a film called The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, a Swedish documentary about black power in the US. We realized that there are not many films about social movements in Indonesia. My next film project will deal with that. It is very important to talk about our commonality as a society because it is decreasing a lot.

I’ve made two feature films. One is an essay film about the history of Indonesian cinema under President Suharto called New Order Regime. The other is part of our essay film project on ancient Buddhism in Indonesia.

Mike: Is it difficult to get an audience for alternative work?

Yuki: It will never be popular here, it’s the same in every corner of the world. When people hear the words “experimental film” they think about the formalist, avant-garde cinema of the 1920s. That’s why in our festival we try to broaden the definition of what is experimental. We often screen many fiction films. For us, every work of cinema can be read as documentary or experimental. The first film by the Lumiére brothers is a social document that shows female labourers walking out of a factory.

Mike: It’s also an image of a new kind of labour. The first work day is finished but the second begins as the camera rolls, showing them trying to leave the factory. It seems they have entered another factory where their work continues. Cinema has played a very important role in shaping this “second day” of work.

Yuki: Making a festival is not only about showcasing films but how to produce knowledge. That’s why we take our curatorial statements seriously. In Indonesian cinema history the first image was a mountain. From that first image we can talk about the nature of cinema.

Mike: Do you feel pressure to attract new audiences, to fill the theatre, to find people for the workshop?

Yuki: No. It’s hard work but every year we accept only ten percent of those who apply to the workshop. For the last two years the screenings were packed, though we have only 25 seats. People talk about film very seriously in the post-screening discussion. That’s important for us.

For the development of Indonesian cinema we are on the right path, not in terms of the number of people involved, but we have changed the culture, the way people talk about knowledge. Since ARKIPEL, which will always be small, people use the term “curator” when they make a film festival. They try to talk about something instead of just screening films.

Mike: Is your collective mulling over questions of race, alternative sexualities, alternative bodies?

Yuki: In terms of race the issue was here since Dutch colonization divided society according to race. There were three layers in society: the white Dutch, the Chinese and Arabic traders, and the third was the native, local people. That remained until the second president who committed the most heinous acts during 1998, and as a result social movements pushed him out. There were huge riots in many large cities that involved the rape and killing of Chinese people and also protests against this racism. Disaster. We can also trace its influence in our cinema which changed Chinese names to Indonesian names. 1998 was the peak when we broke with this way of thinking, and after that we were more reflexive in discussons about this issue.

Indonesia is a culture of many genders, it’s very diverse. Some cultures know seven genders, some acknowledge three. When colonization recognized only two genders it was adopted blindly. This created problems. But for the grassroots of society, gender is not a problem. According to Muslim it is haram if you are trans or gay or lesbian, but in society we have been living with many traditions of genders and sexualities for centuries, it is in our cultural roots.

Mike: What’s next for Forum Lenteng?

Yuki: We are going to start a two-month art and film criticism workshop next week. I’ll take part in the film history class. We’re going to invite people from other cities in Indonesia because most of the workshop will be online, but we’ll meet together in November, presenting curatorial ideas and new writing. Our knowledge is never complete because it was always written by those who held power. These small narratives from grassroots people are always important.

There is one good thing about Indonesia’s incomplete infrastructure. Someone who didn’t go to film school can one day become an art or film curator by learning from people who have been doing it. That’s how it works in Indonesia. Most contemporary arts curators came from workshops delivered 15 years ago to people who had no formal education in the arts.

Mike: Is it possible to see the work of Indonesian media artists online?

Yuki: We curated works for a video archive in Hong Kong called Videotage https://www.videotage.org.hk/. We have curated two editions of Indonesian and South Asian films for Cinelogue https://cinelogue.com/, an online screening platform in Berlin. We don’t have a distribution service though hopefully it will happen. The government has just started paying attention to culture again after Covid.