'Ibuku' Review: A Dreamlike Tale of Maternal Redemption — SkimNews
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- "Ibuku" is the fourth film from Indonesian writer-director Eddie Cahyono and premiered in Competition at the Busan Film Festival, with the title translating as "my mother."
- Christine Hakim stars as Sumiati, a recently widowed Javanese woman who borrows money from fellow villagers to visit her daughter in a Saudi prison, with the film's emotional weight carried largely on her face through observational camerawork.
- Sri (Ayushita Nugraha) has been sentenced to death for killing her employer and would-be rapist, and the film traces her trajectory back to an arranged marriage Sumiati arranged to escape her late husband's gambling debts.
- The film is rooted in the real-world exploitation of Indonesian migrant workers, with Cahyono citing his own experience of leaving the village to send money home, though the review notes it is not autofiction.
- Sumiati is a former performer of Jathilian (the Javanese horse-trance dance also called Kuda Lumping), and the film extends the ritual's spiritual possession into its handheld, grainy, dreamlike cinematography.
- The review faults Cahyono when he turns to "blatantly surreal imagery" — her husband's specter watching from a tree he hanged himself on, Sumiati suspended by invisible wires — as indelicate next to the film's more suggestive spiritualism.
- Landung Simatupang plays village chief Djatmiko, a kindly but put-upon figure who must reckon with his own potential transgressions toward Sumiati.
Why it matters: The review frames "Ibuku" primarily through its dreamlike cinematography and Hakim's performance, but the film's concrete subject is the real pipeline of Indonesian women sent as domestic workers to Saudi Arabia who end up on death row for killing abusers. Cahyono uses Javanese ritual and village-level patriarchal customs — arranged marriage, dowry as debt escape — to indict both the homegrown and overseas systems that produce those sentences.
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