About ARKIPEL - Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival
The word ARKIPEL was taken from ‘archipelago’ which refers to a term in Indonesian language ‘nusantara’. The word was known since the early 16th century. Nusantara is a group of thousand of islands keeping long globalization history of politics, cultural, and economics. More than 500 years ago, this region has become one of main destinations for Western explorer whom tried to find new areas to be colonized or as trading partner. Besides the European, there were also people came from the East (China, Arab, and India) which made this Nusantara region as an exploration destination in their trading missions of spices and silk. ARKIPEL International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival was initiated by Forum Lenteng to read a global phenomenon in social, political, economic and culture contexts through cinema. Of cinema, it is expected to capture the global society phenomenon, both in terms of aesthetic and socio-political context through the language of documentary and experimental filmmaking.
The festival will always see the development of the cinematic language with critical thinking, regardless of the terms ‘cinema industry’ or independent cinema. For this reason, ARKIPEL will always bring a critical discourse to observe it through curatorial programs, symposium, and public lecture to broaden the knowledge of the ever-changing cutting-edge cinema aesthetics.
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ARKIPEL 2025 theme: Years of Living Dangerously
70 years since the ambitious geopolitical project of the Bandung Conference initiated by the former colonies to formulate a decisive stance towards the two great poles, the thread in the fabric of World History seems to go into the same hole three-four lanes earlier. Human tragedies over sovereignty still occur, regimes that suppress multivocality rise and social justice is yet to be achieved. Everything mutates into a complex bureaucratic language that only the creators or gatekeepers of the language seem to be able to decipher.
Gefährlich leben! Vivere pericolosamente! Vivere pericoloso! Live dangerously…
Nietzsche’s provocation to answer man’s existential crisis through the phrase ‘live dangerously’ went through dramatic tug-of-war in World History. By Mussolini, this phrase became a creed to defend Italy and fascism; by Soekarno, it was interpreted as a phase that Indonesia must go through in its perpetual revolution against imperialism. Both represented crucial times in major geopolitical events: World War II and the height of the Cold War. Soekarno add Tahun (Year) to the phrase as a reading of the momentum of the imperialist powers’ meddling in the Global South that demanded a collective movement within a romantic revolutionary framework, through the recontextualization of the Bandung Conference as the beacon of decolonization thinking and activism. Despite being repeatedly cornered by power, these people’s movements continue to survive and occasionally win, by learning together to counter the language of the gatekeepers, be it filibustering practices, hacking algorithms and systems, and creating noise.
Videogramme Einer Revolution. The Uprising. R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity.
Mass movements that utilize the immediacy of moving images in media technology in the contemporary era compose new poetries of mass events. The distance between body-camera-distribution platform-montage in mass events across locations offers layered reflections on time, location, and the redefinition of living together through the intersection of personal history and public history. With this awareness of experimentation and activism, ARKIPEL wants to explore a cinematic discourse that maps out a shared knowledge production agenda on how to build awareness of living back and forth between systems and non-systems as individuals or collectives-not only in the themes and forms, but also in revolutionary ways of production and distribution.
This theme invites the widest possible cinematic methods and interpretations in dissecting critical issues at the intersection of the private and the public. Years of Living Dangerously is an agitation to build a new imagination in dealing with the zero-sum game of today’s geopolitical reality. Although we all live in locations that provide a ‘mold’ for movement – rings of fire, faults, subtropics – and different regional histories, the desire to live around danger becomes a collective desire to build new worlds.
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Check out and download our previous festival catalogues for free at http://arkipel.org/
PERANSI Award is given to a cinematic work that in a special and fresh way experiments on various possible approaches of the medium and social aspects. Specifically, this category focuses on young filmmakers. The award itself is inspired by David Albert Peransi (1939-1993), an artist, critic, teacher and exponent of modernity in art world and documentary and experimental cinema in Indonesia.
JURY Award is given to the best film of jury’s choice based on the consideration in terms of unique and fresh visual expression, personal maturity in revealing and communicating aesthetic experience, struggle over content and subjective exploration over text/context to its contemporary representation. It is highly likely that the best film in this category offers values of individual nature because the issue and its approach do not fit in many socio-cultural contexts.
FORUM LENTENG Award, as a category for the best film selected by Forum Lenteng, reflect our reading position or critical attitude toward the development of cinematic visual works at an aesthetic and contextual level. The award for this category is given to the film deemed the most open in offering communicative values, whether based on the artistry and content, providing a chance for a different social approach on art and wider experimental possibilities.
ARKIPEL Award is given to the best film in general that, based on jury’s view, has the highest artistic achievement and a potential power to give meanings to its contextual perspective choice. By the content, all those aspects through the film’s visual expression should be successful in offering a newest representation of our contemporary world view as a challenging discourse for the general view over a certain situation revealed by the subject matter. The best film in this category particularly can be considered as representing ARKIPEL’s statement concerning the values offered by the passion and reason of a spirit of the time, becoming an inspiration for aesthetic creations about the world that on the one hand is approved of and on the other hand demands definition and re-definition.
