After over a decade in prison, little trace of filmmaker and member of the leading Communist cultural movement Bachtiar Siagian’s life and work could be found, but Hafiz Rancajale still searched. Alongside his colleagues, they revise his mis-slandered history.
The Glebagan system was created to force farmers to rotate crops and convert some of their land from basic agricultural commodities to industrial raw materials. This system has changed the face of agriculture and shaped the sugar map in various regions in Indonesia. With psychogeographical documentary approach, the film shows the landscape of the sugar map in a village of Krembung region, tracing step by step the sugarcane plantations that occupy farmers' rice fields. It is an observation of a repeating cycle, interjected with past archival footage of sugarcane and people movements.
The voice of Miriam de la Croix’s letter covers the life of a botanist and her three children. The letter contains Miriam de la Croix’s compassion for the plight of the Dutch East Indies under European colonial rule, especially the Netherlands. The content of the letter became the background sound in the activities of a botanist in doing modern work and science with her three children that day, where modernity and science in the Indies actually came together with European colonialism.
A woman looks for traces of surveillance from the urban spaces around her, she uses a camera and takes pictures of things that she thinks are potential surveillance sites, but to understand more about what she is doing, she also positions herself as a surveillance by taking pictures of people, in the middle of her journey, the woman realizes that she is being followed by a man carrying a long lens camera.
