Jalanan directed by Daniel Ziv (Canada/Indonesia 2013) For schedule visit viff.org.
In Jakarta, few things seem as ugly as beautification.
It's the name police and governments give to progress, which includes clearing the streets of some of the city's 7,000 buskers.
First-time filmmaker Daniel Ziv's documentary Jalanan (Indonesian for streetside) follows three musicians making a living with their voices and guitars in a teeming metropolis of 12 million.
Ziv's style is to capture events as they unfold, discarding voiceovers and generally eschewing stylized editing. We simply watch Boni, Titi and Ho deal with life, death, and a flood.
They make their living on the city's cramped buses, offering stories, observations, blessings from Allah, or occasionally howling for the blood of the corrupt before passing around a pouch, hoping the stone-faced commuters will stuff it with 10-cent bills.
Boni lives in a sewage tunnel under a bridge. Despite not knowing how to write he crafts penetrating songs about Jakarta and its people, strumming his guitar without ever dropping his cigarette.
Boni is funny and resourceful, tapping into the city's water supply to keep himself and his family clean, but we wonder how much longer he'll be allowed to stay in his makeshift home.
Titi's struggle is with family. The strain of raising her children and making enough to survive while living with a demanding and sometimes abusive husband seems like more than she can bear. Her songs are the sweetest. She stands amid gridlock, offering good tidings through closed car windows.
If the movie has a rock star, it's Ho.
Relentlessly honest and dedicated, Ho sings about hanging the country's thieves and hypocrites in a voice that's beat-up and kind of beautiful.
One of the movie's most incredible sequences documents Ho as he's taken off the streets and put in a cell with suspected beggars.
Before they put him inside he asks if he can keep his guitar.
Ho writes and plays and we get to see the faces of the most grateful audience in the movie.
Born and raised in the Dunbar area of Vancouver, director Ziv found himself "completely smitten" by Southeast Asia while on a pre-college backpacking trip.
After earning a master's degree in Southeast Asian studies he moved to Jakarta and discovered the city's buskers.
"It's a phenomenon you see everywhere," he says. "It's not like the lone buskers you see at Metro stations in North America or Europe, it's much more of a social, activist phenomenon."
He'd written about the buskers as a journalist and author, but to really capture the songs, Ziv needed cinema.
"The story was so musical and so dynamic and colourful, I just felt this had to be told in an audio-visual medium."
It was also a way to "paint a documentary portrait of Indonesia" through the melodies of street performers.
He spent two months hopping on buses, scouting for musical talent with strong personalities.
"You want people who are not camera shy. .. who have charm and charisma," he says.
He also wanted to document the marginalized poor without treating his subjects as "objects to be pitied."
"I really wanted the characters in my film to have a voice and to have a personality and to have agency and be able to speak for themselves and be in charge of their own fate."
He'd spent five years focused on capturing the songs, emotions, and ruminations on life of the three buskers before getting into the editing room and wondering how to turn 250 hours of footage into a story.
"When you follow people for five years, especially members of the working class in Indonesia. .. so much dramatic shit happens in their lives in five years, that we actually ended up with too many events."
Worried about turning his verite documentary into a soap opera, Ziv focused on home, family and love.
For Canadians, the movie is a chance to be immersed in a world on the other side of the globe.
In Indonesia, the movie is a chance to be immersed in a world only a few blocks away that feels like the other side of the world "The rich people who saw it were blown away by this entirely different class of people," Ziv says. "They came out of the theatre saying, 'Wow, we didn't know poor people could be so wise and so smart and we didn't know that they shared the same concerns about their children that we do about ours.' You'd think that all of that was obvious, but it's amazing how detached the wealthier classes can be."
Ziv also organized free, open-air screenings for working class.
"They were blown away to see members of their own working class on the screen, not as victims or as objects but as heroes of their own story. .. as rock stars."
