Cinema possesses a unique ability to freeze time; becoming a silent witness to personal grief, human tragedy, and the struggle to protect ancestral lands. On the sixth day of the 20th Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival (JAFF), the thematic thread of ‘memory’ and ‘truth’ ran strongly through these three highlighted films: Summer’s Camera, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, and Gestures of Care. Though originating from different mediums and cultural contexts, all three works use the camera as a tool for healing, testimony, and resistance against forgetting.
The emotional journey begins with Summer’s Camera (2025), a fiction feature by director Divine Sung that explores a teenager’s journey toward self-acceptance following her father’s passing. The film moves beyond the theme of grief, illustrating how photography becomes a medium of reconciliation. During the Q&A session, Sung revealed that Summer, who had stopped taking photographs after her father’s death, begins to pick up her father’s old camera again after falling in love with Yeonwoo. This visual pursuit unexpectedly uncovers a hidden truth: her father once had a male lover. With sensitivity and precision, Sung captures Summer’s shifting perception—from seeing her father as a distant figure to embracing him as a complete human being. “Photography is something that can make memories stand still. The light in the film reflects how these memories can eventually become something beautiful to remember,” the director explained, emphasizing how Summer ultimately makes peace with her grief, her father’s identity, and her own—through the lens.
If Summer’s Camera uses the camera to heal personal wounds, the documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk wields it as a weapon against historical erasure amid genocide. Directed by Sepideh Farsi, an Iranian-born, Paris-based filmmaker, the film presents a heartbreaking digital correspondence between herself and Fatima Hassouna, a Palestinian woman living in Gaza. Over the course of more than 200 days, the two exchanged visual messages documenting daily life under relentless bombardment—turning digital technology into a fragile yet vital lifeline of humanity. The film’s narrative shifts into an eternal elegy when communication abruptly ends after Fatima is killed in an Israeli attack on 16 April 2025. Winner of the Gold Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival, the film stands as a monument to memory: a reminder that behind the rising death toll are individuals who once spoke, dreamed, and risked their lives to be heard. Farsi transforms a politically charged issue into an intimate story of friendship, proving that cinema can pierce even the most fortified borders.
A spirit of documenting threatened realities also echoes through Gestures of Care (2025), an observational documentary by anthropologist-filmmaker Aryo Danusiri, that examines the resistance of the Dayak indigenous communities in Central Kalimantan as they confront forest fires. Unlike Farsi, who films from afar, Aryo immerses himself in the field through a visual ethnography approach that challenges the widespread misconception that shifting cultivators are responsible for the fires. Instead, he highlights the work of the Masyarakat Peduli Api (“Fire Care Community”) and the women who tirelessly tend to their land.
In the post-screening discussion, Aryo elaborated on the multimodal strategy he employed, where textual research and visual production evolve symmetrically and without hierarchy. “This kind of artistic intervention reveals new areas previously overlooked by the research team on the ground—such as the issue of food estates,” he noted. The film illustrates how fire, once an ally in agriculture, has now become a threat that compels indigenous communities to build “new worlds” through their daily labor and resilience.
An intimate coming-of-age fiction, a harrowing war documentary, and a critical environmental ethnography—together, they demonstrate that cinema at JAFF20 is far more than entertainment. It is, in itself, a gesture of care: a continuous effort to preserve memory, give form to the unseen, and speak truth amid an ever-changing world.
Photos: JAFF Documentation Team
