Bagasi Trailer

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

Trailer for the film Bagasi.

Bagasi is as much a work about Indonesia and Australia as it is about how media is mediated and remembered. Beginning from the modern-day cliché that travel is an activity for the open-minded, the work gradually illustrates, through the accumulation of contradictory artefacts and recollections, an overall image that is far from a tabula rasa. This approach weaves together Australian immigration policy of the 20th century, the Suharto government, the 2002 Bali bombings, fast food, a Chinese orchestra, and Dutch colonialism, through a personal narrative.

The film was specifically created for an Indonesian audience, in the context of an artistic exchange that took place in 2019. Every storyteller has an innate power. Whether through their creation of narrative, their mastery of language, or the editing decisions that dictate what is shown and what is left unseen. Therefore, a deliberate decision was made to present and perform the work in Indonesian, a language that I had no prior knowledge of. While this gesture will not level the playing field, it is an attempt at making the foreign intimately familiar, without mediation – in order to find out ultimately what points of dialogue may exist.