Mencari Madonna
Indonesia,
2005, 80 min
Shown in 2006
CREDITS
- dir
-
John de Rantau
- prod
-
Garin Nugroho
- scr
-
John de Rantau, Garin Nugroho
- cam
-
Suadi Hutama
- editor
-
Andhy Pulung
- mus
-
Fahmi Alatas
- cast
-
Clara Sinta, Samuel Tunya, Minus C. Caroba
- source
-
SET Film Workshop, Jln. Sinabung No. 4B, Kebayoran Baru, Jakarta Selatan 12120, Indonesia. FAX: +62-21-7229638. EMAIL: set@indo.net.id.
- premiere
-
North American Premiere
-
COMMENTS
John de Rantau and Clara Sinta in attendance.
OTHER
Indonesian film master Garin Nugroho has earned a reputation for making cinema that is engaged with social issues and for having idiosyncratic insight that is neither preachy nor didactic. This approach underlies his production of director John de Rantau’s feature film debut. One of the more unusual AIDS films ever made, Looking for Madonna follows the fate of Joseph, a Papuan teen who, together with his girlfriend Yolanda, contracts AIDS. When Yolanda is burned alive by her father for embarrassing the family, Joseph and his friend Minus (who also acts as the film’s commentator) travel to their home village where they are attracted to the local prostitute, Madonna. In this depressed economy, the local lumberjacks exchange top-grade gaharu (aloe tree wood) for sex and, although Madonna has been rejecting their wood (and the sex), she chooses Joseph one night, and they discover their common infection. At the close, Madonna lights candle tributes to Joseph, while Minus watches him on a posthumous video. While the film’s focus is AIDS awareness and the plight of Joseph and Yolanda, de Rantau adds further dimension to the narrative through the figure of Minus. In the tradition of Nugroho’s “boy-men” (see Octavianus in Bird Man Tale, 2002), Minus is a teenage schoolboy with some very adult attributes—he tells salacious stories to the camera, has sex with twins and seems of strikingly muscular heft for a boy his age. And it is Minus who concludes this moral tale, emphasizing the social ignorance and poverty that have contributed to the spread of AIDS.
—Roger Garcia
FACTOID #202
At the 1978 SFIFF, Paul Mazursky received a tribute at the Palace of Fine Arts. Apparently, the facility’s janitorial staff had not been notified, and the padlocked doors of the Palace had to be cut so the filmmaker and his audience could be let in.
