ARKIPEL Noli Me Tangere – 10th Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival 2023, reflecting on the experiments in ARKIPEL Catch-22 (previous edition) and regular screenings at Bioskopforlen, was held simply and intimately at Bioskopforlen, at the headquarters of Forum Lenteng. With the theme Noli Me Tangere, which departs from geopolitical reflections on the Southeast Asian region and 25 years of reformation in Indonesia, ARKIPEL Noli Me Tangere seeks to read how Modernity and its ghostly Hands affect the learning process of nation states in the Global South and its feedback effects in world civilization. The series of ARKIPEL activities began with the opening ceremony of the festival on September 24, 2023 at the Forum Lenteng headquarters on Jalan H. Shibi and the screening of one opening film from the International Competition program entitled Broken View by Hannes Verhoustraete (Belgium) followed by a conversation at the festival rooftop lounge on the 3rd floor of Forum Lenteng. This year, 31 films qualified for the International Competition. Three of them are from Indonesia, Ritual Belahan IV: Bauran (2022) by Robby Ocktavian, Periphery of The Wind (2022) by Reza Kutjh, and Ghost Light (2021) by Timoteus Anggawan Kusno. Overall, this year’s festival screened 44 films consisting of International Competition, Candrawala, Special Presentation, and Special Screening programs. In the Special Presentation, ARKIPEL collaborates with curators from Asian film archiving institutions, namely Viknesh Kobinathan and Natalie Khoo (Asian Film Archive, Singapore). This year, Candrawala, ARKIPEL’s reading program on Indonesian film trends today is curated by Dini Adanurani. ARKIPEL also presents Candikala films, Forum Lenteng’s newest platform that studies pre-colonial Indonesian visual culture in a Special Presentation. This year’s special screening presents three films produced by Milisifilem Collective’s visual experimentation class Batch VI – Edelweiss. The films produced by Milisifilem Collective respond to Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru tetralogy and are framed in the Minke Project program. As ARKIPEL’s intention to continue to provide critical space for the public and map the development of contemporary cinema, this year a special collaboration is presented by Forum Lenteng and SAVVY Contemporary, a cultural-art organization in Berlin that focuses on disseminating knowledge of the Global South. THINK WELL, a symposium from SAVVY’s United Screens platform that focuses on the circulation of alternative cinema, will be held in Puncak, Bogor, in collaboration with the Indonesian Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology. In its fourth edition, THINK WELL’s game simulation was developed by the team of United Screens (Abhishek Nilamber, Laura Kloeckner), Forum Lenteng (Otty Widasari, Manshur Zikri, Adi Osman, et al), and Pekko Koskinen. THINK WELL Empat: Kelindan Dalam Sedulur plans to embody the spirit and practice of ‘nongkrong’ and ‘sedulur’ which are local terms to counter the distribution discourse of today’s mainstream cinema. The guests brought in for this event were filmmakers, curators, programmers, distributors, academics, publishers coming from Colombia, Panama, Pakistan, Palestine, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Tanzania, Sudan, Lebanon, India, Iran, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia and several European countries. The presence of these guests during the festival provided reflective and critical insights for the post-screening discussions at ARKIPEL Noli Me Tangere. On October 1, 2023 at the Awards Night, Will You Look At Me (2022) by Shuli Huang (China) received the Peransi Award. This was followed by The Porters (2023) by Sarah Vanagt from Belgium, which received the Jury Award. This year the jury decided to give Honorary Mentions to the films R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity (2022) by Mohanad Yaqubi from Palestine and Mangosteen (2023) by Tulapop Saenjaroen from Thailand. The ARKIPEL Award as the highest honor was received by Bo Wang’s An Asian Ghost Story (2023) from Hong Kong and the Netherlands. The five judges who selected the films for the three awards were Hafiz Rancajale, Laura Kloeckner, Ronny Agustinus, Risa Permanadeli and Afrian Purnama. This year’s Forum Lenteng Award was presented to Bo Wang’s An Asian Ghost Story (2023). The ARKIPEL Noli Me Tangere Award Night was closed by a gathering of international guests THINK WELL Empat, the jury, filmmakers, audience and members of Forum Lenteng in the festival lounge. Year Jakarta, Indonesia
2023
ARKIPEL Noli Me Tangere – 10th Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival 2023
