Indonesian filmmaker Ariani Darmawan stepped away from directing for years to raise a family. Her first feature, “Jani Be Good,” which is playing in the Tokyo International Film Festival’s Asian Future competition, turns that experience into a portrait of four women across three generations.
“I stopped making films for over 10 years because I was having a kid and looking after my family, so getting back to it was all I really wanted,” Darmawan tells Variety.
Unfolding across four December days in the lead-up to Christmas, the film follows 13-year-old Jani after she overhears a fight between her 18-year-old sister Julia and their mother Winnie, and Julia leaves home. Winnie, a single mother who works as an accountant and fills fruit hamper orders on the side, grows short-tempered with the daughter who stayed. Jani, who has been secretly trading messages with Julia, leans on her grandmother, Oma, who makes spring rolls to sell so she can put money aside for her own cremation. The household is Chinese-Catholic.
The four leads are Chempa Puteri, Sigi Wimala, Tutie Kirana and Hyori Mika. Darmawan co-wrote the screenplay with Cyntha Hariadi. Taurisia produced for Palari Films, the Jakarta-based company she runs with fellow producer Muhammad Zaidy. Palari, founded in 2016, opens the film in Indonesian cinemas on Dec. 10.
Taurisia, an old friend, called Darmawan in 2022 with an offer to direct a family drama, a genre the filmmaker says she loves. As a working mother, she adds, family life is what she most wants to talk about right now, and only recently has she noticed how much unseen care work it demands every day. Becoming a mother, Darmawan says, also changed the way she sees her own.
“As a kid, I watched her keep the family running, rummaging through things at her desk, making phone calls, cooking dinner, but I never wondered how she felt,” she says. “It took having my own family, in my late thirties, to understand how exhausting and all-consuming it is.”
As the youngest in her own family, Darmawan grew up being treated as the one who understood least. “But that’s exactly what gave me the freedom to watch things from a distance,” she says. “You could say you can only see the constellation when you’re standing outside it.”
Jani is constantly told to be good, though she already is. The film stays with her as she slowly starts to see her mother, sister and grandmother as people with wants and failings of their own. Darmawan says people tend to assume that a household made up entirely of women will find a way to get along.
“Family problems are the same whether it’s all women or a mix of men and women, if there’s a problem in there to begin with,” she says. “Communication can break down between women too, especially because of the power dynamics in a family, where the mother, especially if she’s the breadwinner, feels she has the most right to speak the loudest.”
In many Asian families, she says, disagreements are met with silence to avoid hurting a relative. “But that ends up hurting us even more,” Darmawan says. “If it keeps getting held in and never confronted, it stays a wound and gets passed down to the next generation.”
She sees the same pattern in many all-female households, where staying quiet to avoid making a scene becomes a way of getting through the day. The film never says so outright, she adds, but it shows in how the women protect themselves at home, behind a gate that stays shut and windows fitted with bars.
Winnie responds to Julia’s departure by working harder, and her care reaches her daughters as a stream of instructions and corrections. “I didn’t want Winnie to be a villain, because she isn’t one,” Darmawan says. “I think I understand Winnie because I’m a mother too. I know how easy it is to feel like the one who has the right to speak the loudest. So I didn’t want to judge her.”
From the start, Darmawan, Hariadi and Taurisia agreed that no character would carry the blame, drawing on their own families and their experiences as daughters and mothers. The bigger creative hurdle, Darmawan says, was the co-writing itself. She had mostly written her own films before, and this time had to turn Hariadi’s prose into scenes that would hold an audience without losing the writer’s voice.
Her earlier work ran from shorts to documentaries. Her short “Sugiharti Halim” competed at Clermont-Ferrand and screened at Rotterdam and Busan, while “Silenced” also played Rotterdam. She describes those projects as small-scale, homebound and DIY, a training ground for watching quietly and letting people and spaces carry a scene.
Taurisia says she has followed Darmawan’s shorts since the early 2000s and always expected her to come back to filmmaking. What sold Palari on the project was the maturity of Darmawan’s take on womanhood and motherhood.
The production was compact. The team shot in 13 days, a first for Palari, in a house in Bandung. Darmawan, Hariadi and the four lead actors first read the script together in that house two months before cameras rolled, rehearsed in Jakarta, then returned to the location for the final two weeks of prep with cinematographer Teoh Gay Hian and production designer Suherina. None of the four actors knew each other beforehand, so the casting process included chemistry tests built around Puteri.
“I sat in on the whole process, but when it comes to the final call, I like to leave it to the director,” Taurisia says. “She’s the chef, and she knows her ingredients best.”
Palari won Locarno’s top award, the Golden Leopard, at the festival’s 74th edition with “Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash” (Seperti Dendam, Rindu Harus Dibayar Tuntas). Its output since 2017 has ranged from “Posesif” and “Aruna and Her Palate” to Netflix original “Borderless Fog” (Kabut Berduri), “Dear David” and this year’s “Sleep No More.” For “Jani Be Good,” the company applied for international development funding without success. At home, Taurisia says, festival success brings diversity, recognition and a stronger portfolio.
“On the other hand, it can make our films look ‘too artistic’ or ‘not accessible enough,’ and local investors may see the project as risky,” she says.
The producer points to distribution as the bigger structural problem: Indonesia has exhibitors, but no distributors that reach across the archipelago. One of filmmakers’ biggest nightmares, she says, is having a film judged over a single Thursday-to-Sunday stretch before cinemas decide whether to keep it. To counter that, Palari launched Kelas Komunitas Palari (Palari Community Class) this year, a workshop series teaching film communities around the country to stage screenings and paid watch parties in their own regions. “Jani Be Good” is the program’s first test.
“Many directors struggle to make a second film after their first, and this gap in the film value chain doesn’t help,” Taurisia says. “How can we build film careers, let alone sustainable ones?”
Palari’s slate mixes returning and first-time directors. Edwin is attached to 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 first feature “Goldfish” picked up three awards at the Busan Asian Project Market, and Khozy Rizal’s debut feature, “I Wanna Dance With Myself,” is also on the slate.
Darmawan, who founded the independent library and bookstore Kineruku, intends to keep directing, though she expects further films to come about organically around her family and the bookshop. “As for themes, I’m open to anything, as long as it has sad and sweet relationships between people,” she says. “That’s where things get complicated and interesting.”
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