Could you tell us more about the inception of Eliana, Eliana?
It’s a film about how I see life in Indonesia today, especially the gap between generations, the difficulties for generations to understand one another. What we have now since the reform of the Suharto regime is people blaming each other for what happened. People started to blame each other for all the mistakes that happened in Indonesian history over the past 30 years. The younger generations blamed the older generations and the other way round. So I think it’s very important to make films about this situation, and Eliana, Eliana is a reflection of this. I always admired strong women, basically. I think women are fragile in every society, especially in my society, my culture. In West Sumatra, where my wife’s roots lie, women have always been very strong, very independent. But on the other hand, they are part of the Muslim community, where women always have to obey their husbands. So that kind of contradiction is very interesting, and I started to explore this and found the idea of the
