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 2026 theme: The Damned of The Earth
The topography of terror that has long overlaid the history of violence on this earth in the name of peace is now being massively updated. Its sculptors—the architects of destruction—have converged in new syndicates that appear as shadows of their former bodies: colonialism and imperialism. They cultivate a necropolitics that determines which lives are deemed worthy of living and which are consigned to death within the very spaces they partition and disavow. The orchestration of these networks of peace functions as a legitimizing apparatus for terror, death, and freedom, blurring the meanings of resistance with suicide, martyrdom with liberation. Under the pretext of a state of exception, democracy—the foundation of the modern nation-state—is deceived—or is this, in fact, its dark underside?—into rendering mass extermination logically permissible.
Third spaces—within which the violence externalized from metropolitan colonialism takes form, such as plantations, prisons, and penal colonies—have historically nurtured the very fighters who seized their sovereignty. Yet the colonial legacy that produces borders and hierarchies, the categorization of human beings, and cultural imaginaries of inferiority continues to infiltrate modern sovereignty, which retains the capacity to decide who matters and who may be discarded. Once again, our world today is marked by mobilization and the mass displacement of people, whose spaces are eradicated by disasters generated by regimes of violence, no matter how elaborately grand theories of humanity are composed by their thinkers. The afflicted, the floating masses, the lumpenproletariat, the bromocorah, the wretched of the earth, and the multitude of other labels affixed to bodies haunting the regime all find their relevance here—both the living and the dead.
We are confronted with the massive expansion of forensic work on past atrocities—those long buried and those that occurred only seconds ago—circulating relentlessly through algorithms. The construction of novum, both juridical and speculative, is mobilized to challenge and dismantle terror as it continually reincarnates in the present. Necromantic practices are enacted to summon the dead to testify to their own murders and to the systems that sanctioned their annihilation. In cinema, such testimonies have long served as raw material, explored experimentally and instrumental in reshaping cinematic language across eras. In a time when cinema has become an internalized apparatus that transforms the technological behavior of humanity, how might it enable testimonies that are disruptive and experimental?
In its thirteenth edition, ARKIPEL—as a platform for critical reflection on contemporary global phenomena—seeks articulations of resistance through an experimental cinematic language, both in form and in methods of production and distribution. How might speculative engagements with these emerging languages ultimately impress cinema’s capacity to summon and to predict? An act of mancy—par excellence—that divines a way out of the politics of terror.
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Check out our website at http://arkipel.id/
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.
