Indonesian filmmaker Ariani Darmawan stepped away from directing for years to raise a family. Her first feature film, “Jani Be Good,” which was screened at the Tokyo International Film Festival’s Asian Future competition, transforms this experience into a portrait of four women from three generations.
“I stopped making films for over 10 years because I had a child and was taking care of my family, so all I really wanted was to go back,” says Darmawan. Diversity.
Set over the four December days before Christmas, the film is about 13-year-old Jani overhearing a fight between her 18-year-old sister Julia and her mother Winnie, and Julia leaving home. Winnie, a single mother who works as an accountant and also fills fruit basket orders, becomes irritable with her remaining daughter. Jani, who is secretly texting with Julia, relies on her grandmother Oma, who makes spring rolls, to set aside money for her own funeral. The household is Chinese-Catholic.
The four leads are Chempa Puteri, Sigi Wimala, Tutie Kirana and Hyori Mika. Darmawan co-wrote the script with Cyntha Hariadi. Taurisia produces for the Jakarta-based company Palari Films, which she runs with her producer friend Muhammad Zaidy. Founded in 2016, Palari will release the film in Indonesian cinemas on December 10.
Taurisia, an old friend, called Darmawan in 2022 with an offer to direct a family drama, which the producer said he loved. She adds that as a working mother, what she wants to talk about most right now is family life, and it’s only recently that she’s realized how much unseen care work this entails every day. Darmawan says that becoming a mother has also changed her perspective on herself.
“As a child, I watched her manage the family, rummage through her desk, make phone calls, cook dinner, but I never wondered how she felt,” she says. “It took having a family of my own in my late thirties to realize how exhausting and exhausting it was.”
Darmawan, the youngest in his family, grew up being treated as the least understanding person. “But that’s exactly what gives me the freedom to watch things from afar,” he says. “You might say that you can only see the constellation when you stand outside of it.”
Jani is constantly told that she is fine, but she already is. The film stays with him as he slowly comes to see his mother, sister, and grandmother as people with their own desires and failures. Darmawan says people tend to assume that an all-female family will find a way to get along.
“If there’s a problem to begin with, the family problems are the same whether it’s all women or a mix of men and women,” he says. “Communication between women can also break down, especially because of the power dynamics in the family where the mother feels she has the right to speak the loudest, especially if she is the breadwinner.”
In many Asian families, he says, disagreements are met with silence to avoid harming a relative. “But this hurts us even more,” says Darmawan. “If it is kept that way and never confronted, it remains a wound and is passed on to future generations.”
She sees the same pattern in many all-female households, where keeping quiet to avoid causing a scene has become a way to get through the day. She adds that the film is never stated that explicitly, but it does show how women protect themselves at home, behind a closed door and barred windows.
Winnie responds to Julia’s departure by working harder, and her attention reaches her daughters in a stream of instructions and corrections. “I didn’t want Winnie to be the bad guy because she’s not like that,” says Darmawan. “I think I understand Winnie because I’m a mother too. I know how easy it is to feel like the person who has the right to speak the loudest. So I didn’t want to judge her.”
From the beginning, Darmawan, Hariadi and Taurisia agreed that no character would take the blame, drawing from their own families and experiences as daughters and mothers. Darmawan says the biggest creative hurdle is co-writing. He had previously mostly written his own films, and this time he had to transform Hariadi’s prose into scenes that would hold the audience without losing the author’s voice.
His previous work has ranged from short films to documentaries. His short film “Sugiharti Halim” competed in Clermont-Ferrand and was shown in Rotterdam and Busan; He played in Rotterdam in “Silenced”. He describes these projects as small-scale, home-going and DIY, a training ground for quietly watching and letting people and spaces carry a scene.
Taurisia says she has been following Darmawan’s short films since the early 2000s and always expected him to return to filmmaking. What won Palari the project was Darmawan’s maturity in womanhood and motherhood.
Production was compact. The team shot in 13 days at a house in Bandung, a first for Palari. Darmawan, Hariadi and the four lead actors first read the script together at that house two months before cameras started rolling, rehearsed in Jakarta, and then returned to the location for a final two weeks of preparation with director of photography Teoh Gay Hian and production designer Suherina. None of the four actors knew each other beforehand, so the casting process involved chemistry tests created by Puteri.
“I was involved in the whole process, but when it comes to the final decision, I like to leave it up to the director,” Taurisia says. “He is the chef and knows his ingredients best.”
Palari won Locarno’s biggest prize, the Golden Leopard, with her song “Revenge is Mine, Others Pay in Cash” (Seperti Dendam, Rindu Harus Dibayar Tuntas), held in the 74th year of the festival. Since 2017, his production has ranged from “Posesif” and “Aruna and Her Palate” to the Netflix original “Borderless Fog” (Kabut Berduri), “Dear David” and this year’s “Sleep No More.” The company applied for international development funding for “Jani Be Good” but was unsuccessful. Taurisia says the success of the festival brings diversity, recognition and a stronger portfolio within the country.
“On the other hand, it could make our films seem ‘too artsy’ or ‘not accessible enough,’ and local investors might see the project as risky,” he says.
The manufacturer points out that distribution is a larger structural problem: there are exhibitors in Indonesia but no distributors reaching the archipelago. One of filmmakers’ biggest nightmares, he says, is having to evaluate a movie on a single Thursday through Sunday before theaters decide whether to keep the movie. To counter this, this year Palari launched Kelas Komunitas Palari (Palari Community Classroom), a workshop series that teaches film communities across the country how to host screenings and paid viewing parties in their areas. “Be Good Jani” is the first test of the program.
“Many directors struggle to make a second film after their first, and this gap in the film value chain does not help,” says Taurisia. “How can we build film careers, let alone sustainable ones?”
Palari’s roster includes returning and first-time directors. Edwin is involved in the coming-of-age film “Menari dengan Bayangan” (Dancing With My Shadows, working title), a collaboration with Hindia, the solo project of singer-songwriter Baskara Putra. Aditya Ahmad’s debut feature film “Goldfish” received three awards at the Busan Asian Project Market, and Khozy Rizal’s debut feature film “I Want to Dance with Myself” is also among the nominees.
Darmawan, who founded the independent library and bookstore Kineruku, plans to continue directing but expects other films to come organically around his family and bookstore. “When it comes to themes, I’m open to anything, as long as it’s sad and sweet relationships between people,” he says. “This is where things get complicated and interesting.”