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Annah la Javanaise

Fatimah Tobing Rony // Indonesia // 2020 // 05:59 min

Animation

Synopsis:
The story of a 13-year-old girl who loses her family, home and native language. In 1893, she comes to Paris to work as a servant and model for French painter Paul Gauguin.

Three Questions for the Director

1. Short Film has a unique way of telling stories and exploring themes. What is it that fascinates you about the short format?

Fatimah Tobing Rony: What I love about the short film is that they are often about ordinary people faced one day with an extraordinary problem, even crisis. In my film’s case I wanted to show a day in the life of the historic figure Annah la Javanaise, a trafficked thirteen-year-old girl who was brought to Paris and worked for painter Paul Gauguin. I tell the story not from Gauguin’s point of view, as is the traditional story, but from her point of view.

2. The program your film is selected for is called “Lifting the Veil”: What connection do you see between your film and that title?
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3. What film has inspried you most to make films yourself and what part of it do you see in your own work?

Fatimah Tobing Rony: Probably the film that has most inspired me in my life is Charles Burnett’s feature film Killer of Sheep (1978). The freedom and the extraordinary reality of that film, about the lives of black people, really woke me up to a different kind of cinema. Other films that have truly stayed with me, like tattoos on my heart, are Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984) and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff (1954). In terms of animation, Nora Twomey’s The Breadwinner (2017), Denis Do’s Funan (2019), Salvador Simó’s Bunuel in the Labrynth of the Turtles (2018), Alê Abreus’s Boy and the World (2013), Jéremy Clapin's I Lost My Body (2020), Jae-hoon Ahn’s The Shaman Sorceress (2020), Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee (2021), and Florence Miailhe La Traversée (2021).