IMPETIGORE

Maya works nights at a toll booth when a man attacks her with a machete. He knows her name and the village she comes from – of which she herself knows nothing, since she never met her parents. She travels with her friend Dini to the remote village, hoping for a house that might belong to her. There are no children there, a shadow puppeteer and his enforcer Ki Saptadi rule the place, and the past of Maya’s family is bound up with a curse that they may need her to lift. In “Impetigore” (Indonesia 2019), Joko Anwar tells a village horror story in which the ghosts come from history.

Anwar combines genre with wayang shadow theatre and pre-colonial traditions; the violence is drastic, the images carefully composed. The film screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020 – a rare invitation for an Indonesian genre film. “Impetigore” was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2020.

Shown at the 2020 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

All films 2020 · Film Archive