IFFR 2009: BLIND PIG WHO WANTS TO FLY Review

In Malaysia, the Chinese minority is actually the majority: with 40% of the population being of Chinese descent you can rest assured that in their minds, hearts and customs, these people are still very much Chinese.

But how different this is in neighboring country Indonesia, where the Chinese minority really IS small, counting for less than a percent of the total population. These people sometimes face an ethnic identity crisis because the Chinese as a group have historically not been a popular one in Indonesia, often facing discrimination and sometimes even persecution.

Struggling with questions concerning his ethnic background himself, director Edwin (just Edwin) based his first feature film on what it means for someone who is Chinese to be living in contemporary Indonesia. If it does mean anything at all...

That film is "Blind Pig Who Wants To Fly" and it just had its European Premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.


Continued after the break...

The Story:

"Blind Pig Who Wants To Fly" follows several people in Indonesia in a series of short segments. Some of these are in the present, some of these are in the past, all resolve around family and acquaintances of a Chinese girl called Linda. Her childhood boyfriend wants to be Japanese, her mother is a former badminton champion, her blind father is a dentist who decides to be "more Indonesian", and his assistant wants to participate in the "Indonesian Idol" even though her voice is crap.

And Linda herself knows a good party trick: she puts lit firecrackers in her mouth.

Amongst the patients of the dentist is a (non-Chinese) gay couple who want a baby, and through a convoluted set of circumstances they get the aforementioned group of Chinese people to help them.


The Movie:

Director Edwin is known for several music videos and shorts, and as such you might expect this film to be jumpy and flashy. Surprisingly enough the opposite is true: Edwin takes his time with each shot, keeping the jumpiness limited to his script rather than his editing.

Maybe he takes a bit too much time though, as his movie drags a bit even at a mere 77 minutes.

The segments which make up this running time are often wryly funny, sometimes sad. A few are totally absurd, especially when you're forced to look at a pig for minutes on end.
Some segments are uncomfortable. Like when actual news footage of Chinese citizens being massacred during riots are edited to Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called To Say I Love You" (a song Edwin uses throughout the movie for different purposes).

And one segment in particular is rather shocking and uncomfortable to watch.
It is, quite literally, a ??WTF??-moment.

That part also features Joko Anwar (the director of "Kala: Dead Time" and "The Forbidden Door") as a supporting actor, and it's not a tiny role or a cameo either: he plays half of the gay couple and has an eh... pivotal part in the proceedings.
The acting in general looks very natural except in those scenes where caricature is called for.

In the end the movie left me with a bit of an odd feeling. Did I like it? Hm.
I didn't get any sort of answer or resolution, but then again maybe I wasn't supposed to get any.

Maybe this odd, slightly unsettling feeling corresponds with what you feel if you are Chinese in Indonesia?


Conclusion:

Being neither Chinese nor Indonesian, I was interested to see if "Blind Pig Who Wants To Fly" could convey the inner turmoil which director Edwin so easily describes in the short synopsis he put in the press map.
The answer to that is "yes", but then again so did that synopsis. So in this case a word says as much as a thousand pictures.

Rotterdam audiences gave this film a 3.1 out of 5.
Edwin will leave Rotterdam satisfied though: his debut won the FIRESCO International Critics’ Prize.