There’s a second, someplace between exchanging favourite movies and confronting one another’s psyche, the place two strangers from totally different international locations should determine whether or not they can truly make one thing collectively. For the eight administrators on the middle of “Next Step Studio Indonesia 2026,” that second arrived final 12 months in Jakarta. The consequence, screening in Cannes’ Critics’ Week, shall be seen to the world: 4 quick movies, every co-written and co-directed by one Indonesian filmmaker and one counterpart from elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
This system is the primary Indonesian version of Subsequent Step Studio, a touring initiative that started as La Manufacturing facility on the Filmmaker’s Fortnight in 2013 and has since rotated yearly by means of totally different international locations. Its creator, producer Dominique Welinski, designed it round a particular conviction: that the compressed, cross-cultural means of co-writing and co-directing with a stranger is itself a type of filmmaker coaching that no lab or residency fairly replicates. “More than 80 directors have gone through this program since 2013, most of them did their first feature and did open in big festivals,” Welinski says. Alumni whose trajectories bear that out embrace Manuela Martelli, whose “The Meltdown” premieres in Un Sure Regard at this 12 months’s Cannes, Urska Djukic, whose “Little Trouble Girl” performed Berlin 2025 and Tan Siyou, whose “Amoeba” screened at Toronto 2025.
“It took us more than two years to convince them that Indonesia deserves to be the country of focus, and we are delighted that we can finally present four short films by these eight directors at Critics’ Week,” say Yulia Evina Bhara and Amerta Kusuma, the KawanKawan Media producers behind this system.
The 4 pairings are: Reza Fahriyansyah with Ananth Subramaniam of Malaysia on “Holy Crowd,” a resurrection narrative that ideas into collective hysteria; Shelby Kho with Sein Lyan Tun of Myanmar on “Original Wound,” a research of siblings negotiating conflicting reminiscences of a controlling mom; Reza Rahadian with Sam Manacsa of the Philippines on “Annisa,” a portrait of a blind teenager discovering her voice throughout a neighborhood nationwide day celebration; and Khozy Rizal with Lam Li Shuen of Singapore on “Mothers Are Mothering,” a hallucinatory account of a lady in an abusive marriage reaching for escape. All 4 have been shot in Jakarta, and none of them softens its material.
“Complete creative freedom — that’s non-negotiable for the kind of cinema we want to make,” Bhara and Kusuma say. “The directors brought difficult material because that’s where their honest impulses led them, and our job as producers is to make sure they have the conditions to handle it well.”
The collaboration course of was not often frictionless, and the administrators are candid about what that friction felt like. Fahriyansyah and Subramaniam discovered early widespread floor in a shared exhaustion with the identical pressure — the way in which religion and group in Southeast Asia can tip from one thing intimate into one thing authoritarian — and “Holy Crowd” grew from that alignment. Their variations surfaced in execution: how particular spiritual imagery ought to learn on display, how far towards exaggeration or restraint any given scene ought to go. “Those clashes were productive,” Subramaniam says. “They forced us to constantly question our assumptions, and instead of resolving them we found ways to let both differences exist within the film.”
“Holy Crowd”
KawanKawan Media
Fahriyansyah describes a set self-discipline that lower by means of the noise of these variations. “Whenever we hit a crossroads under time pressure, we’d just strip everything back and ask: What is the character feeling right now, and what do we want the audience to feel?” he says. The surrealism in “Holy Crowd” — a risen girl sits silent in her coffin whereas the village round her instantly begins to monetize and regulate the miracle — by no means overwhelms the human logic beneath it. “That, to me, is where the surreal lives,” Subramaniam says. “Not in the resurrection itself, but in how quickly everyone agrees to behave like it makes sense.”
For Kho and Lyan Tun, the co-writing course of on “Original Wound” started from a distinct place: a shared inquiry into private trauma that made the method itself really feel uncomfortably near the fabric. “When you have a scar, you keep looking and picking at it – it’s there and you can’t ignore it,” Kho says. “The writing had already begun on our skin.” Lyan Tun discovered that the tensions that emerged on set, the moments when their totally different instincts about how to answer an surprising drawback collided, finally formed the movie’s texture. “Collaboration is not about compromise alone, but about creating something new together,” he says. The movie’s central pressure — that two siblings maintain irreconcilable variations of the identical previous, neither totally right — was constructed into the performances intentionally. “Each character holds a different version of the truth, and neither is fully complete,” Lyan Tun says.
“Original Wound”
KawanKawan Media
“Annisa” got here collectively by means of a distinct type of intimacy: Rahadian already knew the actual Anissa, the blind teenager on the story’s middle, and introduced her story to Manacsa as the start line for his or her collaboration. “When Reza shared with me the story of Anissa, whom he had met, it intrigued me so much that I wanted to hear more about her,” Manacsa says. The movie’s key formal determination — to anchor every part in sound reasonably than sophisticated visible methods — adopted from that. “The soundscape of the environment becomes full and collective, even as she sits there quiet and contemplative,” Manacsa says. For Rahadian, this system carries stakes past any single movie. “Next Step Studio gives stories from Indonesia and Southeast Asia the chance to be heard and discussed more widely,” he says. “This collaboration is also an opportunity for us as fellow Southeast Asian filmmakers to communicate with one another.”
“Annisa”
KawanKawan Media
“Mothers Are Mothering” introduced collectively Rizal’s deeply private supply materials — drawn from his personal conversations along with his mom concerning the struggles of dwelling as a lady in a conservative atmosphere — and Li Shuen’s style for sci-fi allegory and surreal texture. Li Shuen, who says she is accustomed to co-directing by means of her long-running filmmaking partnership along with her husband, Mark Chua, discovered the collaboration with Rizal pure from the beginning. “Khozy brought a deeply personal story, and I brought the strange, otherworldly sci-fi lens through which these experiences could be allegorized,” she says. “Together, the story developed into something that could speak to very real and painful issues that women face through fantasy and surreal humour.” Rizal describes a artistic dynamic that not often required adjudication. “It was always easy to lay everything out and talk it through,” he says. “We’re kind of on the same wavelength — equally insane, with pretty much the same taste in everything.”
For Bhara and Kusuma, the inventive outcomes are solely a part of the purpose. The producers are frank concerning the structural drawback that makes a program like this essential. Indonesia produces round 200 movies a 12 months, however the pool of producers outfitted to navigate worldwide co-productions is, by their estimate, 10 to fifteen deep. Hole financing barely exists domestically. There isn’t a tax rebate scheme corresponding to Thailand’s. Arthouse tasks are nonetheless assembled the previous means — a patchwork of European public funds, Asian funds, and native matching, every bit signaling credibility to the subsequent financier. “The opportunity is real,” Bhara and Kusuma say. “The risk is that the momentum passes before the infrastructure catches up.”
That pressure shapes how KawanKawan frames this program — not simply as a showcase however as a structural intervention. The movies have Rediance on board as worldwide gross sales agent from day one, a head begin most quick movies by no means get. Welinski has constructed the Cannes premiere round structured trade entry: conferences with pageant programmers and potential co-producers designed to generate working relationships, not simply visibility. “Out of the very experience of co-writing and co-directing with someone you don’t know, from another country, speaking another language and a different culture, I hope the program was helpful somehow in the financing process,” Welinski says.
The version is totally financed from Indonesian sources — the Jakarta Provincial Authorities, the Ministry of Tradition, the French Embassy in Indonesia, Timor-Leste and ASEAN, and a gaggle of govt producers drawn from the native trade together with Angga Dwimas Sasongko, Dian Sastrowardoyo, and Prilly Latuconsina, who additionally seems in “Holy Crowd.” The producers flag this with deliberate intent. Worldwide companions, Bhara and Kusuma argue, nonetheless too usually deal with Indonesia as a location reasonably than a artistic voice. “Indonesian films travelled because of their cultural specificity as the substance, not the decor,” they are saying.
Eight administrators working throughout languages and borders inside a 15-minute canvas are the most recent proof for that argument. “If even half of these directors leave Cannes with a feature project moving forward and partners they trust, the program has done its job,” Bhara and Kusuma say. “I guess this is why it’s called ‘Next Step.’”
