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.