Transforming Documentary: Indonesian Women and Sexuality in the Film Pertaruhan [At Stake] (2008)

Abstract

As the above images attest, the documentary film Pertaruhan [At Stake] takes as its raw subject matter images of women and sexuality never before seen on screen in Indonesia. This controversial content – overseas lesbian communities, inadequate health care for women, female circumcision, AIDS and illegal prostitution – is not the only thing shocking about this film, which premiered at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival. Produced by Nia Dinata, one of Indonesia’s most famous director/ producers, and directed by five unknown film-makers who were trained in a documentary workshop, Pertaruhan [At Stake] reconfigures, translates, and converts the genre of the commercial feature documentary, overturning certain conventions regarding the authorial voice and subjectivity of the film-maker and his or her relation to the audience. This chapter will delineate the importance of the film in two areas: (1) its frank treatment of the transnational and globalized subject matter of Indonesian women and sexuality, which heretofore had hardly ever been broached in private discourse much less on the big screen; and (2) its divergence from the traditional form of authorship, production, distribution and exhibition of the feature commercial documentary.

A laughing Indonesian woman, on her day off as a caregiver, serenades her pretty girlfriend, another Indonesian migrant worker, in a karaoke club in Hong Kong ….

In West Java, a little girl in a puffy red tulle dress sitting in an eagle-shaped palanquin is carried on the shoulders of four dancing young men at the festival before her circumcision …. Her pinched face, heavily powdered and lipsticked, is unsmiling ….

A Chinese-Indonesian woman is lying on an examining table in a Jakarta clinic after having had a pap smear, when the elderly gynaecologist suddenly puts his hands on her bare thighs and intones the Lord’s Prayer in English ….

A stout, no-nonsense mother who breaks stones in the blazing sun during the day in a village in East Java, gets on a motorcycle at night to cluck at potential male clients in a Chinese graveyard at the top of a mountain ….