This year, the director and specialist Asian cinematography Bastian Meiresonne will be coming to the festival as well. His documentary “Garuda Power – The Spirit Within” will show you what a thorny path led to the success – with a tinge of Pyrrhic victory – of Indonesian cinema, a tradition that is more closely linked to the action genre than most other national cinemas. Indeed, Indonesia’s first- ever feature-length film, “The Magic Monkey” (Loetoeng Kasaroeng, 1926, d. L. Heuveldorp), is an action-packed adaption of a folktale. Through a selection of films and interviews with film professionals, critics and regular people, punctuated by moments of humour and melancholy, the documentary unobtrusively provides a cutaway view of the genre, identifying the factors that have shaped it from its origins to the present. Despite the international but isolated success of “The Raid” and its sequel, the film also draws attention to the still-unflattering status of not only the action genre, but Indonesian cinema as such. With a raised finger, but all the more heartfelt for it, “Garuda Power – The Spirit Within” introduces the viewer to forgotten film hero of the past.
