Celebrating Muslim Diversity at Madani Film Festival

By: Patrick F. Campos, a film critic, programmer, and associate professor at the University of the Philippines, as well as a member of NETPAC and FIPRESCI.

In bustling Central Jakarta, a singular gateway to world cinema opened through the Madani International Film Festival last 7-12 October. It is a coming of age, the most extensive iteration of its six-year run, screening 75 films from 26 countries.

Aspiring to “celebrate Muslim diversity,” Madani Film Festival is the only festival of its kind on such a scale in multicultural Southeast Asia. It exhibits a fitting vision from a festival in Indonesia, the country with the single largest Muslim population.

DEEP HUMAN BONDS

Being from the Philippines, with a Christian-majority and Muslim-minority population, I was fortunate to immerse myself in Madani’s rich programming. My festival experience was an eye-opening journey, outward and inward.

In wrong-headed reasoning, I initially imagined myself as an “outsider.” Coming in, I harbored vague notions of “Muslim” films, a subsection of “world” cinema. Watching the films themselves disabused me of my assumptions.

An atheist learns to accept her teenage daughter’s conversion to Islam in Eva Spreitzhofer’s comedy What Have We Done to Deserve This (Austria). An albino in a black society struggles to belong in Adebayo Oluwatunmise Ayobami’s short Kaseko (Nigeria). A poor man from an indigenous tribe wrestles with his loss of faith as his wife battles cancer in Farrukh Turk’s drama Kalasha (Pakistan). A storm brings darkness, but the sun returns to shine on radiant flowers in Sreeparna Ghosh’s children’s animation The Weather Within (India).

Gathering such films under this year’s theme of buhul (knots) corrects the thinking that there is an “outsider” in fundamentally human affairs. These are ordeals we can sympathize with. We all yearn for deep human bonds and wish never to walk alone in dark times.

MUSLIM FILMS CONFOUND ASSUMPTIONS

Madani is not premised on an essential definition of “Muslim” cinema, although it affirms, in the way no other festival in the region does, the existence of a Muslim world.

The festival explores and interrogates manifestations of films by or concerning Muslims, their histories, aesthetics, narratives, and individual and collective joys and predicaments.

These are captured in works like Marwa Ali Elsharkawy’s documentary Ikinji’s Stories (Egypt), where old women sing the fading songs from one of the oldest Bedouin lands in the Arab world; Garin Nugroho’s dance film Sarung (Indonesia), which celebrates the humble cloth; and Agnieszka Zarba’s animation The Cave of Tales (Poland), with familiar landscapes and visual patterns employed in parable.

The selections reveal the complex dynamics of belief, culture, law, nation, and identity in such programs as Puan Madani (films on women’s issues), Tenggara (regional realities), and In This World (global currents).

They also highlight processes not reducible to being Muslim, such as democratization, secularism, liberalism, and feminism.

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