Credits
Producer: Set Workshop and Ford Foundation
Director : Aryo Danusiri Supervising
Producer: Garin Nugroho Didong
Performance: the people of Pegasing, Central Aceh Running
Time : 25 mins
Language: Acehnese and Indonesian with English subtitles
The Poet of the Linge Homeland is a portrait of the Acehnese didong poet, Ibrahim Kadir. Danusiri’s short succinct portrait of Kabir explores his life within its context in the lake town of Takengon in the Gayo Highlands of Central Aceh: the evolution of his poetry from the period of his childhood; its relation to his sense of nature; the role of didong performances and competitions within Takengon society; the repressive political atmosphere of the period of his youth; and particularly the importance to Kabir of the preservation of indigenous performance forms, oral culture and rituals specific to Takengon; and of the dangers confronting the survival of such performance skills in a period where there is so much competition from technologically and electronically reproduced media.
(Ibrahim Kadir first came to international attention for his role as the poet in Eros Djarot’s 1987 film Tjoet Nja’ Dhien. In 2000 Garin Nugroho’s Puisi Tak Terkuburkan (‘Poetry Cannot be Buried’) in which Ibrahim Kabir appears in a central role, used Kabir’s recollections of 3 weeks as a prisoner (mistaken for a communist during the round up of October 1965) to dramatise the situation in the prisons at the time, as a way of mourning the killings of communists throughout Indonesia in 1965 and 1966, an issue which was not independently examined in film in Indonesia at any time in the next 35 years.). (Sumber : artsonline.monash.edu.au)
