Let Blind Pigs Fly

“Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly” opens today at MOMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters in New York City as part of their ongoing film exhibition, “Contemporasian”.¹ The movie, written and directed by a one-named Indonesian filmmaker, Edwin, portrays the lives of several loosely related characters in a series of vignettes. The backdrop is last year in Jakarta when it was commemorating the 10th anniversary of the ethnic violence that rocked the city in 1998. According to film critic Mike Hale in his New York Times column today:²

American audiences may find “Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly,” the debut feature of the one-named Indonesian director Edwin, a bit slow and cryptic for a dark comedy about feeling out of place in one’s own country. But given censorship — relaxed since the 1990s, but still there — and a national reluctance to confront the ethnic scapegoating that occasionally results in the murders of large numbers of Indonesian Chinese, it’s a sign of changing times that the film could be made at all.

Consider the setting and how these characters seek to be someone or somewhere else: a young ethnic Chinese woman who has started calling his grandpa by a Dutch word instead of Indonesian; a friend who wishes he were Japanese instead, having been beaten up as child for being a “Chinese brat”; and, an affluent gay Indonesian who wants to engage in a particular sex act with his apprehensive lover. The theme of the film should resonate as strongly here as in Jakarta, even if the ethnic and cultural background of the characters may be altogether different.

Here is the trailer of the movie when it was first released by Filmmuseum Distribution last July:

¹Museum of Modern Art, New York City
²Mike Hale, “Feeling Like Aliens in Their Own Land”, The New York Times