As Kamila Andini’s Before, Now & Then comes to US cinemas, the mother of contemporary Indonesian cinema muses on mistresses, dreams and what kind of horror film she should make.
This interview was conducted during the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of writers and actors currently on strike, many of the films covered on Journal wouldn’t exist.
We live within spirits. We live in this ghost story all the time.
—Kamila AndiniScroll the comments on any of our social posts about Kamila Andini and you’ll find “mother” compliments aplenty. The Indonesian filmmaker, whose 2021 coming-of-age feature, FourColours Films colleagues are nurturing a different cast of independent voices.
Andini’s own particular means of expression is to tell stories of Indonesian women and their struggles for self-determination against the republic’s Islamist backdrop. Child marriage, gender violence, political representation, the rights of people to love who they love: the issues are broad and critical on a human rights level, but Andini tends to zero in on a single household, layering a lush, illusive atmosphere over day-to-day domesticity.
In her 2017 break-out feature The Seen and Unseen, Anidini’s focus was a ten-year-old girl learning to let go of her twin brother. In Yuni, Arawinda Kirana plays the title teenager, a free-spirited high-schooler consigned by her family to an early marriage. Before, Now & Then (known as Nana in Indonesia) is Andini’s first period film; since its Berlinale premiere in 2022, we’ve had our eye on this mid-20th-century portrait of a woman who finds refuge, if not happiness, with an older, wealthy man after her father is killed and her first husband goes missing. Later this year, the Netflix series Cigarette Girl (Gadis Kretek) will set an epic romance against the backdrop of a family’s clove cigarette trade.
These are distinctly Indonesian stories, but there’s a keenly felt universal connection to the idea that a woman’s choice is not always able to be made freely. It’s something Andini is relieved to hear, when we meet. “That’s what has always been very scary: every time you make a film, you’re quite nervous that you don’t know if people could catch what you want to talk about or not,” she says. “I always talked about something very subtle and very specific, so this connection is actually a blessing for me as a filmmaker—that’s what makes me go on, doing what I want to do.”
Nana’s story, a true one, is set during the transition years between the bloody fight for Indonesian independence from Dutch rule in the late 1940s, and the brutal, anti-communist beginnings of the Suharto regime in the mid-1960s. Andini read about Nana in a chapter of Ahda Imran’s novel Jais Darga Namaku and felt instantly connected to her as “a certain woman that is in my memory”. Like Nana, both of Andini’s grandmothers were from West Java, and one of them had shared similar experiences from that time.
For the filmmaker, Before, Now & Then is a bridge between past, present and future—between what’s changed for women and what hasn‘t—explored “in a very intimate place called home, inside the smallest institution that we have, which is family and marriage.” (As Shu writes on Letterboxd, “it may not seem like a film that talks about the war in abundance, but its effects are clear on the worn-out souls of women, it humiliates them bitterly.”) Much of Nana’s day-to-day activity is confined to the home and neighboring produce farm her family owns, with occasional trips to the market where her husband’s mistress, Ino (Laura Basuki, who won a Silver Bear at the 2022 Berlinale for her work), runs a butchery.
The physical restrictions set by Nana’s own limitations and the pandemic during which the film was made invited artistic opportunities for Andini’s crew. The sumptuous textures of Ricky Lionardi’s compositions soundtrack the domestic rhythms Nana is captive to. “It’s like the inner dialogue of Nana,” Andini explains, “the feelings going to the surface for the audience to understand what she’s been through, and what she’s feeling.”
It was “a lot of work” for her composer to discover the distinctive motif he eventually landed on. “Repetition is something that we needed in the film because we know that that’s a certain feeling that’s been coming back again and again. The film talks about being a mother, being a woman inside a marriage, and how even when you are living in a beautiful family or beautiful house, sometimes you will feel lonely. And there’s always a time when you have to redefine yourself, again and again.”
Each of my films is actually very personal; each of them represents who I am as an Indonesian, as a woman, at that certain moment. Cinema is very present for me every time I make it.
—Kamila Andini
Nana, played with an alert interiority by Batara Goempar. “He always wanted to be very close to her,” Andini explains. “But we want to have a distance as well, so a long lens is something that we use all over the movie. Whenever we see her, we always see her through something. Like, we know her, but we do not really know her. She has a secret. Mystery is something that we wanted felt as a nuance in the film.”
Nuance is a hallmark of the film’s other plot: the unfolding relationship between Nana and the mistress, Ino. We’re taught through conventional storytelling and internalized misogyny that “the other woman” spells danger, but Before, Now & Then subverts this idea. Indonesia, Andini explains, is a communal society in which even women can get in their own way: “We want to be what the community, the society, expects you to be. We want to be like what everyone else divines. What a ‘good woman’ is. You are sort of trying to shape yourself for someone else, and for what the patriarchy proposes maybe that’s what the society needs. So sometimes the most pressure is actually coming from another woman.”
But Ino is different. “When I write about Ino, I want her to be herself, so she can also liberate Nana. I know that she’s supposed to be the mistress, but the of another woman who shows you that you can be anything you want is precious, I think.” (Chocofit’s Letterboxd review agrees: “My favorite scene is Nana and Ino’s meet-cute at the market, but the one that gets me overwhelmed is when Ino came at Nana at the party saying ‘a woman as beautiful as you doesn’t deserve to be at the back of the house’. These two were really made for each other.”)
Our conversation takes place in Melbourne, a favorite city for Kamila Andini. She studied media arts and sociology here at the start of her career, and has returned several times; this year, to be a jury member for the Melbourne International Film Festival’s prestigious Bright Horizons award, which was won by Ramata Toulaye-Sy’s Banel & Adama—another film about a woman defying her community’s expectations around gender. “I’m seeing a good future,” Andini says of the eleven finalists, all “young filmmakers, very brave and eager to create and find their own language.”
Finding one’s own film language is the task of every moving-image maker, and the very best know that each frame of film they capture will live in conversation with frames from across the past century-plus of the art form. Reviews of Before, Now & Then, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Andini understands the easy, marketing-friendly reach, whether or not it’s fair—she’s as inspired by Céline Sciamma‘s Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Tran Ahn Hung’s The Scent of Green Papaya as she is by WKW or Weerasethakul.
“Each of my films is actually very personal; each of them represents who I am as an Indonesian, as a woman, at that certain moment. Cinema is very present for me every time I make it,” she says. “Every time you make a film you want to find yourself in each of the projects, so it’s felt weird. It’s just like, ‘okay’. But I can get where it came from as well. Wong Kar-wai, he’s one of our heroes as an Asian filmmaker, his work influences a lot of us. He is amazing.”
The thing is, I suggest, that the moment anyone ever films a couple smoking cigarettes in an alleyway, people are always going to yell “In the Mood for Love!”. “Yeah, exactly,” she laughs. “That’s very strong. I think the way that people connect this to him, it means that he did a brilliant work of creating and owning a scene.”
Something the filmmaker strives to own with each new film is a grasp of the intangible. It’s all through the liminal spaces in The Seen and Unseen and in Nana’s nightmares in Before, Now & Then. Andini is mastering a visceral expression of the very real way that Indonesians live alongside their ancestors. It makes me wonder if—given a couple of particularly brutal, meaty scenes in Before, Now & Then—Andini might have a horror film up her sleeve?
“That’s actually my own question as well, because if you know Indonesian cinema, our box office is actually all horror films. So if I want to make a box office [hit], maybe I should make a horror film now! But yeah, I mean, horror stories, it’s been in our blood since forever as an Indonesian. We live within spirits. We live in this ghost story all the time. I believe that spirits live together with us in harmony, not scaring each other, so I don’t like demonic ghosts.”
And you don’t need to dream up demons when you have real-life specters like General Suharto, I suggest. “Yeah, we already have so many demonic people. Maybe I will make a horror story one time, but it’ll be my own way of horror film.”
‘Before, Now & Then’ is now screening in select US cinemas via Film Movement, and streaming on Prime Video in Indonesia. ‘Cigarette Girl’ comes to Netflix on November 2. Kamila’s quotes have been lightly edited to honor the fact that English is not her first language.
