At the last years, a lot of film festivals and film workshops conducted at my city, Yogyakarta. But, I’ve never seen Junior High School students or youth among 13-15 years old involved or maybe been invited there. Even as film subject they are not represented yet.
In Indonesia, there are so many feature films and television soap operas about youth, but youth represented here mostly are youth in senior high school. Why this situation happened? It’s because my community still think them as children that can not think as a big person. For me, I think that
there should not a difference between youth at age 13-15 and also youth at 16-18. For me, they are the same. Maybe they have a little bit different way of life and thinking, but both of them are in the transtition community. And for me, this moment is very important for everybody including me.
Like my experience when I was in Junior High School, I moved from my hometown Cilacap to Yogyakarta to continue my study here. In that moment, I felt that I never have a courage to involve my self or been involved. But then, when I went to Senior High School, there’s a lot of film workshops and festivals that made me become a film lover and filmmaker until now. Making film as a beginner makes me more confidence and learning how to improve my social networking, especially friendship. I have more friends from here. And now, I am confidence to contribute in my community because I have skill that I can share to other friends. I wish that I could learn all of this knowledge since I was 13, when I was in Junior High School. I believe if I learn it earlier, I will be more creative and have more friends and I could share my experiences earlier than now.
I believe that film can be a good medium for youth in learning express their self, their thinking and their opinion to community. It’s a good medium because film is combination of visual and audio medium that very attractive to human sense. It’s because youth in Indonesia are the main audienses for films and TV programs. They have a close relation with all audio visual medium that distributed in our mainstream media. In the process, filmaking teach us how to make a good teamwork and make a good planning and managing for everything. And filmmaking make us aware with what happen in our community.
This time, digital technology become cheaper and cheaper in Indonesia. Every family or school have their own video camera. They even can use their good camera handphone to shoot and documentating their moment. So, there’s no reason to not involved their youth group in community in an early time, so they can learn and share to community where they live (home and school).
My younger sister who sits in Junior High School now, made her fisrt film last year. Its not a perfect film of course, but I saw that she has a lot of spirits to complete her films. I saw that she’s learning how to make a good teamwork, tolerance and tried to understand each other. I hope that she could continue her interest after graduate her Junior High School and become more expert than me now.
My dreams, in my city, that would be a film festival where youth between 13-18 years old become participants, submit their films, follow the workshop and compete their films. And this festival could literate public that teenagers can make their own films and express their identity through film.
If there’s alot of films made by youth, I hope that society will counted them as the city members, that can give real contribution to community. And I believe that films made by youth can give to community a new image of Indonesian teenagers, through media.