Mouly Surya on Indonesian Period Thriller About Dutch Colonization ‘This City Is a Battlefield’ Closing Rotterdam: ‘It’s a Shared History’
It is quite an interesting choice for the largest film festival in the Netherlands to close with a film that explicitly denounces the violence of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia, but one can always expect interesting choices from the International Film Festival Rotterdam. This year’s closing film, Mouly Surya’s “This City Is a Battlefield,” takes place in Jakarta in 1946 as Nationalist leaders have declared independence but the city remains under Dutch control, with tensions escalating to bloody, violent clashes.
Speaking with Variety ahead of the festival gala, Surya says she doesn’t think “kids learn about Indonesia at schools in the Netherlands” but she’s been surprised at the conversations she’s had since arriving in Rotterdam. “There are different versions of history depending on who is telling it. I’ve been meeting people who have connections to that part of the country’s history, whose grandparents were in the Dutch military and stationed in Indonesia at the time. So, for good or for bad, it is a shared history and also super recent, so it’s all very much still interconnected.”
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“We don’t have a glossary as filmmakers to explain what happened in Indonesia during those times,” she continued. “I have to explain it as best as I can, within the historical context, because it is not as famous a story as other parts of history around the same time. To place it within an international context is what I am trying to do with this film — it is and was a challenge but a fun challenge. It is a little bit like making a film in the future — you weren’t there to see what happened but use your imagination because you don’t want the film to be limited.”
“This City Is a Battlefield” is an adaptation of Mochtar Lubis’ 1952 novel “A Road With No End” and focuses largely on violin teacher Isa (Chicco Jerikho), who works for the resistance, Hazil (Jerome Kurnia), a sweet-spoken rebel tasked with assisting the musician, and Fathima (Ariel Tatum), Isa’s wife and Hazil’s object of desire.
Tatum tells Variety that it was “a blessing in disguise” that the book did not describe her character in great depth. “Mouly decided we would develop these layers ourselves and, during pre-production, we had conversations about how to add more depth to her so everything would make sense regarding the love triangle we have in the movie.”
“We spoke about her education, where she came from, how she met her husband, and what happened before their marital problem came to the surface,” continues the actor. “It was a very interesting part of the process because I had the privilege of filling in those blanks to help the character be more alive.”
Before making “This City Is a Battlefield,” Surya had her first experience working within the U.S. film industry with Netflix’s Jessica Alba-starring thriller “Trigger Warning.” The director says having a female Indonesian filmmaker at the helm of a major U.S. blockbuster was “unheard of” and she now sees her time within the studio system as a “second postgraduate degree.”
“The project came to me around 2019 and I was supposed to shoot the film in 2020 but everybody knows what happened,” recalls the director. “We already had some financing going on at that time for ‘This City Is Not a Battlefield’ but not enough to be able to handle the COVID measures so we went into co-production markets, which is why we have seven co-production countries. I went to the U.S. in 2021 and it was a pretty complicated system over there, obviously, and I ended up staying for almost two years including post-production. While I was finishing VFX on ‘Trigger Warning,’ I was filming ‘Battlefield’ so the two bled into each other a bit.”
The Netherlands, through IFFR’s Hubert Bals Fund, is one of the co-production countries involved in “This City Is a Battlefield.” This builds on the festival’s ongoing commitment to fostering Indonesian talent. Festival director Vanja Kaludjercic told Variety they have been “deliberately working on creating and carrying out a bigger space within the festival to show how rich the national production of Indonesia is.”
Last December, the Netherlands and Indonesia signed an audiovisual co-production agreement at the inaugural JAFF Market in Yogyakarta. The treaty recognizes qualifying co-productions as national productions in both countries, opening access to subsidies including support from the Netherlands Film Fund and a potential 35% cash rebate through the Netherlands Film Production Incentive.
“I feel like we are all looking forward to future collaborations between the Netherlands and Indonesia,” adds Surya. “Our country has a huge film industry but it focuses a lot on local audiences, which is manageable considering we have 280 million people living in Indonesia, but I think global attention is needed for an industry to grow.”
The director emphasized how she has always aimed to make films “for festivals” and sees the opportunity of traveling internationally with her work as a way of “broadening creativity.” “I feel like this is what we’re missing at the moment, a way of broadening our horizons and seeing films outside of Hollywood or what is popular, to have more of a critical thinking about cinema. Right now there are a lot of filmmakers working in Indonesia but there is still so much room to grow.”
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