Indonesian filmmaker Ariani Darmawan stepped away from directing for years to raise a family. Her first feature, “Jani Be Good,” which is playing in the Tokyo International Film Festival’s Asian Future competition, turns that experience into a portrait of four women across three generations. Unfolding across four December days in the lead-up to Christmas, the film follows 13-year-old Jani after she overhears a fight between her 18-year-old sister Julia and their mother Winnie, and Julia leaves home.
Winnie, a single mother who works as an accountant and fills fruit hamper orders on the side, grows short-tempered with the daughter who stayed. Jani, who has been secretly trading messages with Julia, leans on her grandmother, Oma, who makes spring rolls to sell so she can put money aside for her own cremation. The household is Chinese-Catholic.
The four leads are Chempa Puteri, Sigi Wimala, Tutie Kirana and Hyori Mika. Darmawan co-wrote the screenplay with Cyntha Hariadi. Taurisia produced for Palari Films, the Jakarta-based company she runs with fellow producer Muhammad Zaidy.
Palari, founded in 2016, opens the film in Indonesian cinemas on Dec. 10. Taurisia, an old friend, called Darmawan in 2022 with an offer to direct a family drama, a genre the filmmaker says she loves. As a working mother, she adds, family life is what she most wants to talk about right now, and only recently has she noticed how much unseen care work it demands every day.
Becoming a mother, Darmawan says, also changed the way she sees her own. The film stays with her as she slowly starts to see her mother, sister and grandmother as people with wants and failings of their own. Darmawan says people tend to assume that a household made up entirely of women will find a way to get along.
The film never says so outright, she adds, but it shows in how the women protect themselves at home, behind a gate that stays shut and windows fitted with bars. Winnie responds to Julia’s departure by working harder, and her care reaches her daughters as a stream of instructions and corrections. I know how easy it is to feel like the one who has the right to speak the loudest.
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