As ‘Cigarette Girl’ Drops Trailer, Kamila Andini Talks Female Empowerment, Indonesia’s Troublesome History: ‘We Are Not Good at Seeing Things Face On’ (EXCLUSIVE)
variety.comPatrick Frater Asia Bureau Chief Acclaimed film-making duo Kamila Andini and Ifa Isfansyah take a calculatedly side-on approach to Indonesian societal history in “Cigarette Girl,” a new Netflix series that releases on Nov.1 and which premiered its first episodes at the Busan International Film Festival earlier this month.
Starting with a wealthy family about to lose its aging patriarch in 2001, the series uses flashbacks to the 1960s to uncover not only the origins of the family’s herbal cigarette or ‘Kretek’ fortune, but also the hidden romance underlying it.
And it highlights the overbearing and only slowly changing societal pressures placed on women, from high and low ranks, even as Indonesian politics and government underwent tectonic shifts.
Ahead of the Busan premiere Andini and Isfansyah told Variety how their lush and romantic treatment is both a product of changing society and a way of facing up to recent Indonesian history.Watch the new trailer here. How do you pitch the show, as a romance, a thriller or as a history lesson? Andini: This ambiguity is one of the things we loved about the story.
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