With his father in jail and his brother abroad for work, young Rakib has become the caretaker of a retired general’s house where his family has worked for several generations. When the general returns home to run an electoral campaign in this rural area – which he intends to modernise by dint of expropriations – Rakib begins to work for him and discovers a mixture of pleasure and fascination as he draws closer to this powerful figure. The general takes him under his wing, but his shady influence leads the young man to stray a little further from his own principles. A retrospective gaze on the experience of adolescence during the final years of Indonesia’s military dictatorship, this first feature film raises precise questions about the subterfuges induced by a violence that had infiltrated the cogs of the political and social machinery, to the point of sparking disgust and revolt. FM
French Premiere
