Mouly Surya on Indonesian Period Thriller About Dutch Colonization ‘This City Is a Battlefield’ Closing Rotterdam: ‘It’s a Shared History’

variety.com:

Rafa Sales Ross Guest Contributor It is quite an interesting choice for the largest film festival in the Netherlands to close with a film that explicitly denounces the violence of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia, but one can always expect interesting choices from the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

This year’s closing film, Mouly Surya’s “This City Is a Battlefield,” takes place in Jakarta in 1946 as Nationalist leaders have declared independence but the city remains under Dutch control, with tensions escalating to bloody, violent clashes.

Speaking with Variety ahead of the festival gala, Surya says she doesn’t think “kids learn about Indonesia at schools in the Netherlands” but she’s been surprised at the conversations she’s had since arriving in Rotterdam. “There are different versions of history depending on who is telling it.

I’ve been meeting people who have connections to that part of the country’s history, whose grandparents were in the Dutch military and stationed in Indonesia at the time.