'Ibuku,' starring Christine Hakim, premieres in Busan competition
Eddie Cahyono's Ibuku, starring Christine Hakim, has premiered in Busan competition. She plays a Javanese widow trying to reach a daughter on death row in Saudi Arabia. The festival runs through October 15.
Mina Park
Ibuku, which means "my mother," has had its world premiere in competition at the Busan International Film Festival. The festival runs through October 15.
Christine Hakim plays Sumiati, a widow in her sixties in a Javanese village. She is a jathilan dancer, a Javanese folk form she was known for when she was younger, and she lives alone now.
Indonesian director Eddie Cahyono, who is from Yogyakarta, shot the film on 16mm. It runs 96 minutes. Indonesia, Japan, and Hong Kong produced it.
Her husband, Wagiman, took his own life and left gambling debts. Their daughter, Sri, played by Ayushita Nugraha, fled a forced marriage and an abusive husband for Saudi Arabia. Cahyono says Sumiati's advice then was to be patient.
A lost letter reaches Sumiati. Sri is on death row there, after she killed an employer who tried to rape her. The mother starts asking friends and relatives for the fare to see her daughter one last time.
Cahyono first brought the story to Busan's project market in 2015, under the title The Wasted Land. It won the market's ARTE prize. He says that draft already had a mother trying to reach a daughter facing a death sentence, and that he still could not write how the woman left behind would feel.
He rewrote it around his own mother, who had left her village for the city and missed her family. He cut most of the daughter's scenes. The finished film stays in the village.
Hakim has been attached since that 2015 conversation. North American viewers know her as the mycologist in the Jakarta episode of The Last of Us. In Indonesia she is the actress who played the Acehnese fighter Cut Nyak Dhien in Tjoet Nja' Dhien.
Ibuku is his fourth feature. His 2014 film Siti won best film at the 2015 Citra Awards. The one before this was the 2021 family story Losmen Bu Broto.
Our read: he arrived in Busan with the death sentence already in the draft, and he still could not write the mother. The film in competition is that woman, at home. The eleven years included the writing, the financing, and the wait to shoot on 16mm.
