Indonesia: Questions over "?"

I watched Hanung Bramantyo’s "?" (Tanda Tanya, or Question Mark) on the last night of the Indonesian Film Festival in Melbourne last week. Set in Semarang, in Central Java, it looks at relations between communities that are sometimes at odds with each other – Muslims and Christians, Chinese and Javanese.

The movie is much more complex than the snapshot provided in the trailer. It tries to portray the intensity and anguish of religious feeling, and the difficulty of relating to those of other faiths – issues that are perhaps hard to understand in more secular societies. It shows how religious motivations become more complex when they get entwined with issues of family status or ambition. But it also tries to soften stereotypes. In this movie, no community has a monopoly on either wise or not-so-wise people and behaviour; every community has its heroes. Often using humour, it tries to help us understand that each person’s search is, at root, very similar.

But as I watched, I couldn’t help wondering how it had gone down in Indonesia, where it’s much harder to be just a dispassionate observer of religion. It was easy to imagine how parties on all sides might feel misrepresented or aggrieved. Fishing through various blogs the next day, I found the movie had indeed caused controversy. And sure enough, yesterday came the news that private broadcaster SCTV had been pressured by Front Pembela Islam (FPI, or Islamic Defenders’ Front) into not showing "?" as scheduled.

The actions both of the FPI, which represents a very small constituency in Indonesia, and of SCTV have subsequently been roundly criticized. The variety of perspectives from which this criticism has come is in itself interesting. Both the movie and the reactions it has provoked are a reminder that Indonesia’s religious landscape is complex and emotive, and the worst way to understand it is to stereotype it.

UPDATE: Inaya Rakhmani has an interesting review of Tanda Tanya, along with a discussion of the public debate surrounding it.