Indonesian filmmaker and artist Riar Rizaldi’s work frequently uses the horror genre as a framework to examine capitalist extraction, new technologies, indigenous mythologies and the relationship between the human and the non-human. 

Since its genesis in the early 1970s, horror cinema in Indonesia has been a vessel for the New Order’s ideology: the ghost, the djinn and the monster represent a disorder that needed to be exterminated by the ruling authority figures, religious leaders and military personnel. However, the genre underwent changes in the early noughties as a result of both the regime change, and the emergence of low-budget DIY filmmaking, which emerged from rural contexts – a new approach to filmmaking from cinematic elsewheres. 

In his performance lecture Ghosts Like Us (2020), Rizaldi merges traditional horror films with low-budget bootleg films against his own form of ‘desktop cinema’ to explore different perceptions of folklore in rural and urban Indonesia, and how changing cinematic technologies to VHS and digital media have disrupted the traditional ideological logic of cinema. Horror, for Rizaldi, becomes a political vessel to access alternate realities.

Presented in partnership with Sine Screen and Gasworks.

Programme

Ghost Like Us, dir. Riar Rizaldi 2020, 35 min.
Revisiting the Indonesian horror / exploitation films of the 80s and 90s that he loved as a teenager, Riar Rizaldi examines the ways in which these films – shown outside of the theatre and other formal spaces of the film industry – constitute a ‘cinematic elsewhere’. 

Notes from Gog Magog, dir. Riar Rizaldi 2022, 20 min.
An essay film exploring the relationship between logistics workers in Indonesia, tech company culture in South Korea, and their diverging ghost stories. 

Neonatal Unit, dir. Riar Rizaldi, 2021, 12 min.
A lost video signal transmitted to the past from the future of re-militarised Indonesia archipelago when demographic dividend reached its peak.

Followed by an Artist talk hosted by April Lin.