Sunshower

Micko Boanerges / Indonesia / 2024 / International Premiere / 60 min.

synopsis

The turbulent pre-election atmosphere in Indonesia becomes absurd background noise to everyday scenes of a stagnant village life in the film Sunshower. Director Micko Boanerges visits his grandparents in the countryside and observes how little the struggle over the country's fate disrupts the peaceful flow of life there. The minimalist film lets the black-and-white camera rest on everyday scenes in which so little happens that the rush to bring in the laundry at the onset of a rain shower becomes one of the most dramatic scenes. The director's grandparents barely exchange a few words and spend most of their time just relaxing, paying little attention to the disputes between election candidates blaring from the television. Sunshower can thus be viewed as a contribution to the meditative cinematography of empty scenes, but also as an ironic film that draws on the aesthetics of boredom, showing the contrast between the turbulent situation in the public sphere and people who rarely come into contact with it.

“You said that the leaders who have never been poor couldn’t lead their people. I think that this statement is mistaken and has to be straightened out. What if the leaders who have always been wealthy turned out to be capable of leading.”

biography

Micko Boanerges (b. 2002) is an Indonesian filmmaker who has so far made a short film entitled Outside the Frame (2023), consisting of a shot of a traffic light on a road in Jakarta, accompanied by a casual dialogue between two filmmakers commenting on the scene.