“This is the best festival in the world. I haven’t had so much fun since my bar mitzvah.”

Etgar Keret.

Etgar, this is your first trip to Indonesia – no easy feat on an Israeli passport. What made you decide to come to Bali?
Richard Flanagan recommended the festival to me, but the main reason was: I know this is a country where there is some hatred for Israel. And I really feel that whenever you come to a place where there is anti-Semitism, there’s something very humanizing about it – an abstract idea can take the form of a human being. For sure I didn’t come to try to justify anything my government does, because this is not a government that I specifically vote for, but I came to give a glimpse of those ambiguities of existence that exist in real life and are portrayed in fiction.

Do you feel like a representative of Israel when you travel?
It’s not that I feel that I represent my country, as much as I feel that I represent myself. When people don’t know me, they a priori hate me. There’s this phenomenon that’s anti-Israel. People aren’t anti-Italian or anti-redhead or anti-people who wear sandals, but the fact is that if someone carries this kind of passport you hate him and that’s something that I would like to change.
Israel is a complex country with an active peace movement and all kinds of shifts in its politics, and it’s part of a very complex regional situation – which does not justify the occupation. The truth is that most of us live in a very complex reality.

Have you ever succeeded in breaking down prejudices by appearing at a writers’ festival?
This has happened a lot. For example I met the Indonesian author of the book My Friend the Terrorist, and he said to me that in the past whenever he thought about Israel there was a series of negative images in his mind, but now when he thinks about Israel he sees me smiling.

Do you think humour can play a role in changing people’s attitudes?
I think traditionally humour is always the weapon of the weak. We usually use humour in those places where we can’t change reality. It’s kind of a way of protesting against reality. Look at Irish humour. It’s the same with Jewish humour. When you meet something in your life that you can change, change it. If you can’t, make a joke of it.

Is this what got you started as a writer?
I started writing when in the compulsory army service. I did computer work in shifts of 48 hours, which were very much like solitary confinement. I would go through all kinds of crazy psychological processes, and in one of those shifts I found myself writing.
I wrote a text and then I went to see my older brother. I buzzed his intercom, but it was very early in the morning and he said “I’d better come down, my girlfriend’s mad because you woke her up”. He came down to walk the dog. The dog really wanted to take a crap, but because my brother was reading he kind of dragged him along the street while reading my story. Luckily for the dog this was a very short story, so he was finally able to relieve his doggy urges and my brother said to me “Man, this is amazing. Do you have another copy?” I said “Sure,” and so he bent down and picked up the dog crap with the story.
I realized the power of literature in that moment. I realized what I wanted to do, because this was so much the demonstration of how a text can become part of us. It has nothing to do with the paper.

Do you think you would ever have started writing, without the “solitary confinement”?
I had never written anything before that. I majored in physics and maths, and studied engineering. If I wasn’t writing I don’t know what would have happened — worst case scenario I would have become a very unhappy engineer, and a mediocre one.

What is it about writing that captivates you?
When you’re a soldier, you really don’t have any privacy. You shower with other people; if your girlfriend sends you a letter your sergeant will read it out loud to make fun of you. When you’re writing it’s basically a place that echoes what you really feel, and where that can stay untainted. It’s more than privacy, it’s kind of like me telling myself secrets.
I’m a great believer that writing is creating the space where you can say what you want, and be what you are. In the Biblical times there were safe cities that you could escape to, like a city of refuge. Writing is like that — it is like a sanctuary.

When you talk about writing it sounds like you’re talking about freedom.
There’s something very, very liberating about writing. I often say it is so much easier for me to write than to live. In my stories I can just be.

Has success changed you?
Success is a very tricky thing. It can disconnect you from life. I must say I find it to my advantage that I have such a talent for doing the wrong thing at the wrong time that it seems that no matter how successful I am, I’m still able to fuck it up.

You teach writing at university, and are commonly described as the “voice of young Israel”. Do you feel any sense of responsibility regarding your influence on young minds?
I’m a very responsible, over-stressed kind of guy. I’m the son of Holocaust survivors. My primary instinct since I was a kid, knowing my parents suffered so much, was to just want everybody to be happy. So usually I am suppressed the way somebody living inside society should be. But when I write I’m kind of celebrating my humanity. I think there’s something much more dangerous, responsibility-wise, in manufacturing the right ideology for people, rather than just telling your truth. If it’s the truth, I really believe there can be nothing harmful in it.

Do your parents read your writing?
For sure. They love it. My father once told me: “in your stories, in one half the father always dies, and in the other half he’s an asshole, but in each and every story I can always feel that you love me.”

You say that it’s difficult for you to be a writer in Hebrew, because writers in Hebrew are seen as prophets.
Hebrew is the language of the Bible and is seen as a holy language. When you publish a book in Hebrew it’s always the one that will be next to the Bible on the shelf.
Hebrew has a unique story because it didn’t exist as a spoken language for 2000 years. People were very articulate in reading and understanding it, but they never spoke it until one arbitrary moment where it got defrosted. So it has an intrinsic tension between its very ancient roots and the fact that it has to be anarchistic and chaotic and open to inventing words and importing words, so people can say what they want. There was no Internet in the Bible, there were no faxes in the Bible, so they had to make up something for these things.
Hebrew is both very creative and anarchistic, and at the same time very classic. And that’s what’s fascinating about it for me. It touches this inner contradiction we have in Israeli society, which is a very paradoxical society of not only being young – we have old people but are a young country – but also this contradiction of being wild and conservative.

You have also made films. What’s it like seeing your stories on screen?
There’s something very lonely and egocentric about being a writer. When you write, you just make up what you want and most of your interaction with people is interviews or talks – you’re with people but usually you talk about yourself. You can get used to that, and that’s very dangerous.
For me, filmmaking is about being open, listening, accepting others; it’s all about human interaction and flexibility. I really like collaborating with people. My wife admitted to me that she was jealous of the film editor we were working with, who was a Croatian man who weighed 100kg. She said “I feel your closeness.” A film is like this kind of sexless orgy.

Sex plays quite a role in your writing.
Yeah it does. I would say that when many people meet me they are disappointed or surprised because I’m not like my stories. And it’s for a reason, because if I was like my stories I wouldn’t need to write my stories. I’m not documenting my life, I’m documenting my yearnings. There’s a huge difference.

www.etgarkeret.com

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Bullied and teased on board the Jermal, Jaya longs to escape.

In the midst of the homogeneous stream of today’s Indonesian cinema, Jermal challenges the flow. A thoughtful portrayal of the relationship between a father and a son, it explores a classic theme given a unique twist by its setting: an isolated fishing platform, or jermal, in the middle of the Malacca Straits off North Sumatra.

The central character is Jaya, a 12-year-old schoolboy whose orderly life is dramatically disrupted when, after his mother’s death, he is sent to the jermal to be with his father Johar. Johar, a taciturn and solitary figure, is an escapee from the mainland with a past he is determined to reject. Snubbed by his father, Jaya is left to fend for himself in a tough new environment that transforms him from a naïve schoolboy into a hardened survivor.

The idea for the film was seeded by a Kompas article read by director Ravi Bharwani a few years ago. “I felt at the time that a jermal would be a great place to make a film, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it. I just knew it was a great location. Not just aesthetically, but the possibilities of it being in the middle of the seas, this context of isolation.” Ravi developed the story together with Rayya Makarim in a 2003 scriptwriting workshop with Jakarta-based veteran cineaste Orlow Seunke, finally completing production in 2008.

Here are some outtakes from the experience…

BANDI (played by Yayu A.W. Unru)

Rayya: “When we picked the main actor (Didi Petet), we needed a partner and alter ego who would be able to challenge the main character, because the character of Johar is this big, formidable, strong, intimidating character. Because they’ve worked together for 26 years in pantomime theatre (in the group Sena and Didi Mime), they know each other very well, and Didi recommended him. I think in some scenes Yayu even steals the show! He was a very strong actor.”

Ravi: “I like to see and I like to make films that have minimum dialogue. So we had at first short lines for him, then they became shorter and shorter until finally we had the idea, why not make him mute as well?”

Rayya: “That was a challenge as well, as opposed to other Indonesian films, where everything is so verbal and every single thing is explained. We, especially Ravi, wanted to make a very visual film, so instead of putting things in, we took them out. Also, what I like about Bandi’s character – the irony in the relationship between Bandi and Johar – is that Johar is this person who can talk, he can express himself but he doesn’t say a word, he’s quiet, everything is closed up. Whereas Bandi, who cannot talk, is so expressive – that idea that someone who cannot talk is actually expressing more than somebody who can. Bandi is there as a supporter, but also as somebody who provokes his friend.”

JAYA (played by Iqbal S. Manurung)

Ravi and the casting agency scouted the whole city of Medan and the small towns nearby before discovering Iqbal through a screen test at his school. “He was a natural…the moment that we gave him something to do, he reacted quite fast, without having a script or without even telling him to prepare anything.”

Rayya: “This boy was hyperactive [on set] – you’d think he had no concentration span whatsoever, he’d be goofing around all the time. But the moment we’d say ‘Action’ – we’d have the clapper in front of his face and he’d still be making faces – click – and suddenly he’s there! And sometimes as well it’d be really late and we’d still have to do a few scenes, he’d be completely fast asleep on a chair. I’d have to pull him, ‘come on Jaya’, he’d be grumbling…but he’d do it. The moment we say ‘action’, he acts, and that was quite amazing.”

The Jermal Boys.

Some of the kids cast for the film were actually themselves from the jermal. All had different backgrounds, a couple were from the area, one has his own bakso stall – but they soon forged a close bond.

Rayya: “We stuck them together in a house for about a week or 2 weeks before shooting and when we met them again they were all best friends! They really gelled well together. They were all friends, so bullying got hard, especially the stripping scene [a bullying incident where the jermal boys take Jaya’s clothes and force him to climb up one of the jermal poles]. Jaya cried for an hour, I had to babysit him. He said I’m not ready. I said you’ll never be ready. But if you don’t do it now, you’ll still have to think about it tomorrow… But the kids also felt bad about that scene. They were like ‘how can we do this?’. And when they did it, they did it so well, so naturally – one kid smacked his bottom! They were quite ruthless in their acting, but it worked well.

“Dealing with 9 kids was hard at times, the concentration, they had no experience in acting, no idea what it entailed. They had no idea they were going to stay on a Jermal for 30 days. They didn’t know that a big part of filmmaking is waiting, they were bored.”

Ravi: “For 2 weeks we kept them in the house, then we had a basic reading and doing all the stuff we were going to do in the film, rehearsing. I also made them stay over on the jermal for 2 days, to get the feeling of what it’s like to wake up on the jermal every morning.”

Rayya: “One night suddenly one of the boys, Ahab (the boy who thinks he’s a whale), had a fever. Then he suddenly was making all these different moves on the deck and he became this tiger, growling. He was possessed. For me this was something very exotic, but for the others, this was just something that happened all the time probably. But for me this was fascinating! When they asked him who he was, he answered ‘Mayong’. The workers on the jermal said that this word has two meanings: ‘keeper of the sea’ and ‘young tiger’.

“Then the main actor exorcised him, took some water and threw it on him…it was like watching a bad B film! And you don’t know whether it was acting or if they really believed it…

“There’s a story behind the jermal: the crew member who was lowering Ahab into the boat that night, as he was lowering him, somebody pulled his hair back. And he looked, and it was a little boy, who ran to the other side of the jermal to his mother. There was a family of spirits there, a husband, wife, and child. According to the crew member, the husband was annoyed because the film crew were having a buffet dinner, and had not invited the family to join them. The husband had a bad temper – he entered Ahab, possessed him.

“Then the next day it happened to two of them – Ahab and Franky. They were facing each other on all fours, held back by 5 people each, ready to attack each other. Then it was like, ‘alright, yesterday was fascinating, today we need to finish this! We need to shoot a film!’”

JOHAR (played by Didi Petet)

Didi Petet was always the actor in mind to play the role of the father on the jermal; his name was already written on the script as it developed.

Ravi: “There are not a lot of Indonesian actors who could act well in this type of movie, so he was our first choice. We didn’t consider anyone else.”

Rayya: “Physically he fits the role, and we also thought that you need a formidable actor to be able to make the transition from being a very closed-up man, and slowly and slowly that wall gets scratched, slowly and slowly he opens up. And he also found it a challenge – it’s not just a normal character development, because the original character is a teacher and he had to keep in mind that he used to be this good man, open man, and then he closed himself up because of what happened and became an emotionally different, detached person. And then he had to go back to his original self again. And that for him he said was a challenge, he’d never done anything like that.

“Johar is isolated on so many levels – he wants to close out everything, be distant from everything, that’s why he wears earplugs at night, sleeps with a sarong covering his face, blocks out the light by covering his windows with newspaper. He has shut out the world.”

The jermal is indeed often a place of escape for people who have something to avoid on the mainland.

Ravi: “One whole jermal is occupied by convicts. Nobody even dares to approach their jermal – they have big muscles, long hair. Some of the others have kids that have run away from their homes, just to be away from their parents, work over there. You even see mentally retarded people on some jermals. When they are not accepted by their family, they send them over there. Because they can do manual labour, they don’t need too much experience, they don’t have to interact on a social level, so they are well off over there in comparison.”

Jermal is released in Indonesian cinemas on March 12, 2009.

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Dede Suryana

Mengejar Ombak, the documentary about Dede Suryana, a young surfer from a West Java village who became an international star, has just won two awards at X-Dance Film Festival in Salt Lake City, a sports documentary festival that runs in conjunction with Sundance Film Festival.

Big congratulations to Jakarta-based director Dave Arnold – this has been a labour of love many years in the making, and all the hard work has resulted in an excellent and thoughtful film that explores the journey of a very special kampung kid thrust into the international surfing spotlight.

Click here to view the trailer and read the article about the film that Dave wrote for Kabar back in 2007. Premieres are planned soon for several locations in Indonesia – we’ll keep you posted!

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Trailer for Mengejar Ombak, the documentary film about Indonesian surfing star Dede Suryana that recently had its international premiere at X-Dance Film Festival in Utah and won two awards, for Original Music Score and Emerging Filmmaker.

In 2007, director Dave Arnold shared his aspirations for the film (and made a polite request for funding) in Kabar.
His article is reprinted below.

MENGEJAR OMBAK

I’ve got a certain aversion to self-promotion (it’s all so 90′s) and I didn’t expect this was going to be a large part of what the filmmaking process is about.

As a documentary filmmaker friend commented recently on this very subject, “you might feel like you are begging for money the whole time but no one is paying you full-time to do what you do, so you have to get used to asking people for support, even if it feels a little odd.”

I’m a year into making a feature-length documentary that follows the personal story of Dede Suryana – a young and talented pro surfer who happens to come from a kampung in the Pelabuhan Ratu region. Today Dede is viewed by many of the world’s surf media as one of the best young surfers in both Asia and the world. To add to this repertoire of tricks he’s also beaten Kelly Slater (7 times World Champion) to win a competition in 2003, which was held in Hawaii.

Dede Suryana in action.

Back in 2001, following a dream, at fifteen years old, Dede relocated from his village to Bali – Indonesia’s surf capital. Not long after, he was spotted by Rizal Tanjung, one of Indonesia’s most iconic surfers, and was taken under his wing and offered a lucrative sponsorship deal with Hurley International (a Californian surf brand owned by Nike). Not content to be the top surfer in Asia, Dede’s next step is to travel the world competing on the WQS (World Qualify System) with the aspiration of achieving his dream of being among the world’s best surfers.

What our documentary seeks to explore is how the identity of a Muslim surfer is able to negotiate the rapid cultural changes to his family’s way of life brought on by the ever-increasing influence of Wetern culture; how the dreams of a young man from a developing country are reconciled with a multi-million dollar industry that facilitates them and how Indonesia itself negotiates the financial, environmental and cultural effects of these changes.

Mengejar Ombak follows Dede as he chases his surfing dream.

Opening in Dede’s home in Pelabuhan Ratu, our film, Mengejar Ombak, follows Dede over the course of one year and across 5 continents. The obstacle and triumphs presented to him along his journey will come not only in competition, but also in his response to new places and cultures, the volatile situation in Indonesia, financial gain, and the growing attention he receives. Moving from this central narrative the film interweaves interviews with leading cultural, historical and industry figures to explore the underlying issues Dede’s story raises.

Mengejar Ombak is not merely a simplistic portrayal of a competition with winners and losers, nor is it a naïve tale of small-village heroes against the villains of globalization; rather, it is an insight into the life of a young man attempting to assimilate the challenges to his faith and identity, a personal story that gives us a wider vision of the changes occurring in many developing countries, such as Indonesia, today.

Dave Arnold

Mengejar Ombak is directed by Dave Arnold and Tyrone Lebon and produced by Dave Arnold and Laurence Ellis. The film had its World Premiere at X-Dance Film Festival on Friday January 16th in Salt Lake City, Utah, a sports documentary festival that runs in conjunction with Sundance Film Festival (more info on the festival can be found at www.x-dance.com). A further showing will be hosted by Hurley International on January 29th in Los Angeles. Premieres are planned for Indonesia (Cimaja, Jakarta, Bali) in late February and London in mid-March.

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