Next Step Studio Indonesia

 I am my body, at least to the extent that I have an experience, and reciprocally my body is like a natural subject. — Maurice Merleau-Ponty 

There is a current running through these four short films produced by Next Step Studio Indonesia, and it is not merely their grounding in a shared geography: it is something subtler, a conception of cinema as a liminal practice, as a space of threshold in which the visible continually yields to ritual, to perception, to the collective unconscious, to desire. Contemporary Indonesian cinema — heir to a tradition that has been able to hold together animist legacy, political urgency and the sensoriality of Southeast Asian auteur cinema — here finds a generation of voices that interrogates, without rhetoric and without compromise, the very conditions of the human body in its relationship with community, faith, power, and the possibility of existing elsewhere. 

The thread that unites Holy Crowd, Original Wound, Annisa and Mothers Are Mothering is the deeply philosophical conviction that the body is the primary site of the political and the sacred at once. Not a container of experiences, but a field of forces. The silent body of Ratna, who performs miracles without uttering a word, and who, precisely because of this uncontrollable excess, is soon transformed into an object of suspicion — idolatry, black magic, speculation: three accusations that reveal the community's fear of whatever exceeds the codes of official religion. The body of the deceased mother who continues to rule her children from her absence. The blind body of Annisa, which turns her own perception into a form of claim upon the world. And finally the body of Nia, which, within conjugal violence, fragments into memory, desire and hallucinatory dissolution — a body that takes refuge in visionariness not to flee reality, but to rewrite it in an erotic, feminine key, through a clitoral and sapphic iconography that constitutes an explicit political as well as aesthetic claim. In each of the four works, the body does not represent: it acts, resists, escapes, manifests, desires. It is pure phenomenology, in the sense Merleau-Ponty would give to that word — the body as the root of our being-in-the-world, here restored to its irreducible opacity. 

From this corporeal centrality there follows a second, even more radical shared intuition: the coincidence, within human experience, of what Western culture tends to separate. Faith and exploitation, abuse and care, noise and listening, love and prison, hallucination and truth.
Holy Crowd shows how the miracle is never pure, but immediately captured by the dynamics of power: the sacred made commodity, the inexplicable made pretext, all the way to the reversal whereby the one who has been venerated is then accused — because every excess is frightening, and the community reacts by condemning what it had previously sanctified.
Original Wound takes up, with extraordinary delicacy, the ambivalence of family memory, where the maternal gesture is at once nourishment and violence, and mourning does not liberate but reaffirms the enigma.
Mothers Are Mothering pushes this ambiguity to its extreme: hallucination is not pathology, but language, and lesbian desire, clitoral visions, the fluorescent saturation of colour become forms of resistance to heteropatriarchal normativity, symbolic ways out where real ones are foreclosed.
Annisa too — the most luminous of the four — recounts how the collective celebration can be at once a space of exclusion and an occasion for appearance: the young protagonist does not win against the world, but inscribes herself within it through a modulation of the audible, in a gesture that has something both of existential claim and of grace. 

The choice to place female figures at the centre — girls, sisters, wives, mothers, women resurrected, desiring women, women annihilated or transfigured — is not a thematic device but a poetic and political decision. Indonesia, which is the largest Muslim-majority country in the world and at the same time a crucible of pre-colonial, Hindu-Buddhist, Christian and animist traditions, is read here through what its patriarchal codification tends to obscure: the voice, the skin, the gaze, the suffering and — above all — the desire of those who live at the margins of public speech. The women in these four films are not icons of resistance in the illustrative sense of the word; they are thresholds, in the most anthropological sense — points of passage between the visible and the invisible, between life and death, between religious discourse and what exceeds it, between imposed heterosexuality and an other sexuality that cinema, here, finally dares to name. 

In this tetralogy there is a quality of silence and a quality of colour that strike the viewer in equal measure. The full, almost musical silence of the most rigorous Asian cinemas — a silence that leaves room for ritual, breath, duration — coexists with chromatic and visionary explosions that show how this new generation is capable of holding together the legacy of slow cinema and the urgency of a psychedelic, queer, sensual grammar. In this interval between silence and fluorescence, Annisa's disability becomes epistemology, Ratna's death becomes the theatre of the community and the mirror of its reversals, the loss of the mother in Original Wound becomes archaeology, and the violence suffered by Nia becomes oneiric matter and a claim to feminine pleasure. The Indonesian cinema presented here does not illustrate: it summons. It does not explain: it lets things happen. And it is precisely in this renunciation of the didactic that its maturity is measured. 

From an existential standpoint, what emerges from these four shorts is a meditation on the possibility — or impossibility — of individual redemption within collective structures that impose prefabricated meanings. What does it mean to be saved, if salvation immediately becomes spectacle, and then accusation? What does it mean to be loved, if care is also control? What does it mean to be heard, in a world saturated with noise? What does it mean to desire and to flee, when every way out is inner, hallucinatory, perhaps impossible? These are questions that run through the history of thought — from Kierkegaard to Simone Weil, from liberation theology to the feminist critique of the Global South, from queer studies to the phenomenology of trauma — but which here take on the concreteness of a face, a hand, a naked body painted in fluorescent light. 

The merit of Next Step Studio Indonesia, and of its choice to place Indonesian directors in dialogue with Malaysian, Burmese, Filipino and Singaporean filmmakers, is to have built a platform on which national specificity does not close itself into folklore, but opens onto a regional and universal conversation. One perceives a shared aesthetic — sensorial slowness, attention to the body, distrust of causal narrative, visual and thematic boldness — that is already beginning to configure itself as a school in its own right, capable of speaking of death, illness, disability and gender-based violence without ever falling into pathos or frontal denunciation, and capable, above all, of naming feminine desire — even in its dissident forms — without asking anyone's permission. These four short films do not ask for compassion: they ask for presence. They do not describe pain: they inhabit it, and invite us to inhabit it. 

It is rare to see a short programme in which every work, while autonomous, contributes to a coherent vision of the world. Here it happens. And what remains, after the screening, is the sensation of having crossed not four stories, but a single great question: what remains of the human, when faith wavers and then accuses, when the family is revealed as a prison, when the body refuses to be reduced, when love itself is a form of violence — and when the only possible escape is the one that paints its own desire in colours that reality had never dared. 

We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are. — Anaïs Nin