Indonesia’s Reza Rahadian, Yosep Anggi Noen Talk Busan Premiere ‘24 Hours With Gaspar’; Visinema Pictures’ International Approach
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EXCLUSIVE: Indonesian actor Reza Rahadian and director Yosep Anggi Noen are attending Busan International Film Festival with their dystopian crime drama 24 Hours With Gaspar, which is receiving its world premiere in the festival’s Jiseok competition.
An adaptation of Sabda Armandio’s 2017 novel of the same name, the fast-paced thriller is the biggest budget film that Noen, an award-winning arthouse filmmaker, has ever made and marks the first time he’s worked with Rahadian and Laura Basuki, who are both big stars in Indonesia. Upcoming actress Shenina Cinnamon also stars in the film.
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Noen says he was approached to direct the project by Angga Dwimas Sasongko, founder of Indonesia’s Visinema Pictures and immediately agreed because he liked the book. “It’s a story about loss, because the main character is coming to terms with losing his friend, but it’s also a visualization of a dystopian Indonesia which we’ve rarely seen,” Noen explains. “Visinema said they wanted to make it more mainstream than my previous films, as well as make sure it had international potential, so we decided to cast big names like Reza and Laura.”
Rahadian plays Gaspar, a punky amateur detective in near future Jakarta, investigating a mass slaughter case, who comes across clues to the sudden disappearance of his best friend during childhood. But thanks to a malfunctioning heart, he’s told he only has 24 hours left to live and therefore wrap up the case.
During the investigation, Gaspar pulls in a motley bunch of friends and losers to take on the jewelry store owner whom he suspects is connected to his missing friend. None of them have much choice about joining the mission as it also offers a chance to escape poverty. “All the characters are basically trying to prove themselves, prove that they’re worthy and find their own place in the world, which I found very moving, as that is actually what’s happening in the real world these days,” says Rahadian.
He adds that the character of Gaspar, while compelling, is also manipulative: “He knows how to feed everyone’s ego. The way Anggi has created this, Gaspar has a scene with each character, and in each scene he’s trying to get something out of them, but he’s also feeding their ego.”
Rahadian is known in Indonesia for mainstream romances, dramas and biopics, but has also taken on edgier projects such as Edwin’s Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, which won the Golden Leopard at Locarno film festival, and Ifa Isfansyah’s The Golden Cane Warrior. Also a mainstream star in Indonesia, Basuki won best supporting actress at last year’s Berlin film festival for Kamila Andini’s Before, Now And Then.
“I don’t understand this distinction between so-called arthouse and commercial movies – a good story is a a good story,” says Rahadian, when asked how he chooses projects. “I’ve always wanted to work with Anggi and the role of Gaspar was just a great opportunity to play a character with many layers in the way he expresses anger and revenge.”
Noen’s quirky drama The Science Of Fictions won a Special Mention at Locarno in 2019, and his credits also include Peculiar Vacation And Other Illnesses (2012), Busan Sonje Award winner A Lady Caddy Who Never Saw A Hole In One (2013) and Solo, Solitude (2016). Yulia Evina Bhara, of KawanKawan Media, who worked with Noen on The Science Of Fictions and Solo, Solitude, also produced 24 Hours With Gaspar with Visinema.
Although set in near future Jakarta, at a time when the city is partly underwater (not a huge stretch of the imagination as the city is already sinking in real life), Noen says the production was filmed in the colonial port city of Semarang in Central Java, because it was easier to create the dystopian look. “Thanks to the pandemic, many of the buildings we used were actually abandoned in real life, so we just had to do a bit of dressing and were done,” Noen says. “The post-pandemic era is actually quite a good time to shoot dystopian films.”
Unlike his previous projects, 24 Hours With Gaspar involves action scenes, car chases and fight sequences. Noen smiles when he says that, since the trailer was released, some of Indonesia’s other big studios have contacted him for the first time to see what else he wants to make. “Indonesia’s film industry is changing, because the mainstream studios used to just try to please the mass market, but now the audience is smarter, they see everything on streaming platforms, so they’re trying to upgrade the quality,” Noen says.
One advantage Indonesia has, in addition to its acting and directing talent, is a rich store of literature to tap into for adaptations. Two other high-profile Indonesian productions screening in Busan – Sidharta Tata’s coming-of-age tale Ali Topan, also produced by Visinema and starring Jefri Nichol and Lutesha, and Andini and Isfansyah’s Netflix series Cigarette Girl – are also based on books.
“We have some of Southeast Asia’s biggest literary festivals in Indonesia, so we do have a bank of stories,” says Rahadian. “What we also need to explore is whether that material can be remade in other languages. We do a lot of remakes of Korean and other content in Indonesia, so maybe it’s time to offer our own stories to be remade.”
That’s one of the tasks that Jakarta-based Visinema may be taking on as it builds out a slate of features with international potential with further announcements expected soon. In addition to Gaspar and Ali Topan in Busan, the company’s credits including Sasongko’s 2022 Stealing Raden Saleh, Indonesia’s first heist movie, and the Nussa animation franchise. The company recently brought on board Herry Salim, former Disney Indonesia country manager, as group president and CEO.
Visinema is just one of several ambitious, outward-looking companies in Indonesia, currently one of the creative hotspots in Asia in both commercial and arthouse cinema, which is being celebrated through a special program in Busan. Also screening in the program are BW Purba Negara’s Tales Of The Otherwords, Edwin’s Posesif, Ismail Basbeth’s Sara, Mouly Surya’s What They Don′t Talk About When They Talk About Love and Joko Anwar’s Impetigore.
And there are many more notable upcoming projects in Indonesia, including a new crop of horrors produced by various companies. Among these, Noen says he is next working on an as-yet-unnamed horror film with Meiske Taurisia’s Palari Films (Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash), while Rahadian will soon start shooting Anwar’s Siksa Kabur (Grave Torture).
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