Festival Film Dokumenter Yogyakarta is the first and the biggest documentary film festival in Indonesia. The thesis finds that their establishment of a network linking the film community to civil society organisations also establishes the idea of publicness as an alternative to government narratives. In-Docs has been the pioneer of documentary film culture in post 1998 Indonesia.
Using close observation, semi-structured interviews and archival holdings, three key documentary organisations in Indonesia have been examined: In-Docs, Festival Film Dokumenter Yogyakarta, and Watchdoc Documentary Maker. Grounding the discussion on the transition from authoritarian regime into a more open political situation that occurred since 1998 in Indonesia, the thesis examines constrain and support for documentary films to reach their publics and getting the subject matter contributing into the discussion about the public. This thesis approaches publicness through the tension between local and global settings, and the aesthetic and the institutional. It asks: what kind of documentary film cultures have been established since the 1998 political change? As the infrastructure and channels for documentary film distribution have been barely exist, how do they circulate among their public and what type of institutional arrangements involved to make documentary films able to get circulated in Indonesia? Furthermore this asks: how this documentary culture is related to publicness and the discussion of the public in Indonesia?
This thesis investigates the academically neglected topic of documentary film culture in Indonesia since the political change of 1998.