Women from Rote Island 2024
Sinopsis
A young woman reunites with her mother and sister after returning home after father’s funeral. But the trauma of a brutal attack lingers in her mind.
Cast
- Linda Adoe as Orpa
- Irma Rihi as Martha
- Sallum Ratu Ke as Bertha
- Van Jhoov as Damar
Review
“We all were born through a bloody genital,” says Orpa (Merlinda Dessy Adoe), a mother of two daughters and a member of a ramshackle village on Indonesia’s Rote Island. In this statement, she strips sentimentality from the act of childbirth and alludes to a simple truth: that we are all born from a wound. And for the women of Rote Island — who are ensconced in a patriarchy so deep that there is no viable form of escape — they carry that wound with them in perpetuity.
The suffering of local women is the hard, amber core of Jeremias Nyangoen’s directorial debut “Women from Rote Island,” titled in Indonesian as “Women of Blood.” The film racked up the accolades of Best Film at the Indonesian Film Festival and Best Indonesian Film at Jakarta Film Week, before earning a Special Mention in the Uncaged competition for Best Film at the New York Asian Film Festival.
After the death of Orpa’s husband, Abram, she allows him to go unburied for eight days — a decision that sparks the ire of her fellow community members — as she waits for her daughter Martha (Irma Novita Rihi), an illegal worker on a palm oil plantation in Malaysia, to return for the funeral.
