Fauzan Zidni is at Cannes this 12 months because the newly elected chair of the Indonesian Film Agency (BPI) with a program already in Critics’ Week and the company making its first institutional look on the competition.
“Next Step Studio Indonesia” — 4 quick movies by Indonesian administrators made alongside friends from Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Myanmar and produced by Yulia Evina Bhara and Amerta Kusuma at KawanKawan Media and co-produced by Dominique Welinski, this system’s originator and curator — premieres at Critics’ Week. It’s the first Cannes challenge drawn completely from Indonesian financing .
“That is not a debut,” Zidni tells Selection. “That is a thesis.”
The thesis, as Zidni frames it, is that Indonesian cinema’s subsequent part can’t depend on particular person producers’ persistence. “Indonesia is one of the few film markets in the world where local films now routinely outperform Hollywood,” he says. “We have the audience. What we have not yet built is the bridge between that audience and the international industry. That is the work for the next four years.”
Native productions took roughly 67% of the Indonesian field workplace in 2025, with 2026 monitoring at an analogous fee. The structural mismatch Zidni is set to shut is the hole between that native dominance and protracted worldwide invisibility — a niche he attributes to the absence of financing frameworks, authorized infrastructure and distribution structure.
“We do not yet have a CNC, a KOFIC or an IMDA,” he says, naming the respective French, Korean and Singaporean public movie our bodies. “Public film bodies whose architecture pre-finances ambition rather than rewarding it after the fact. Until we do, ambitious projects are assembled from dozens of small pieces. That is exhausting, and more importantly, it is not scalable.”
BPI is pursuing bilateral co-production treaties with France and Korea, constructing on an audiovisual co-production settlement signed with the Netherlands at JAFF Market in 2024. “A treaty is not paperwork,” Zidni says. “It changes how costs are shared, how rights are structured, and which national funds Indonesian projects qualify for.”
The company can be backing a matching-fund mechanism lately relaunched by the Indonesian Ministry of Tradition, below which tasks that safe worldwide financing qualify for matched authorities assist. Zidni expects the measure to speed up each the quantity and scale of outbound co-productions inside two to a few years.
On the native facet, the structural image is difficult. Indonesia has roughly 2,200 screens for a inhabitants of 287 million, concentrated largely in Java, with a single exhibitor controlling round 60% of the community. “Even our biggest local hits leave money on the table,” Zidni says. “And our smaller films — the ones that build slowly on word of mouth — often do not get a fair window at all.”
His time on the Walt Disney Firm, the place he led unique manufacturing in Indonesia between 2022 and 2024, sharpened a conviction he now applies at a nationwide degree. “The honest lesson I took with me, particularly after the global streamers stepped back from commissioning Southeast Asian originals in early 2024, is that we cannot outsource our distribution layer to anyone.”
Zidni is equally direct in regards to the legislative work he considers the company’s most consequential long-term activity. BPI is advocating for a revision of Indonesia’s Movie Regulation, which he expects the Ministry of Tradition to convey to parliament throughout the present time period. “The policy work we are doing now will not produce results next year,” he says. “What it will do, if we get it right, is give Indonesia for the first time a clear legal and financing architecture for international co-production, a stronger institutional role for BPI along the lines of the CNC, a defined role for a national film fund and a regulatory environment that treats the industry as a strategic creative sector rather than a licensing problem.”
For Cannes 2026 particularly, Zidni is concentrating on a mapped-out Cannes Film Market footprint for future delegations and the groundwork for worldwide scholarship and residency partnerships. “If Cannes 2026 produces two or three real co-production conversations, a Marché du Film footprint we can build on, and the beginning of a credible institutional relationship with European and Asian funds, that is the right outcome,” he says. “The deals we want will close in 2027 and 2028.”
