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How the world’s largest Muslim nation deals with pornography. Hera Diani reports
The magnificent obsession of
Indonesia’s moral guardians
Young men leaf through the first edition of an Indonesian version of Playboy magazine at a newsstand in Jakarta. The magazine was released to widespread controversy in April 2006 even though it contained no nude photographs. Photo: AFP
T
he year is 2020. Islamic moral
police reign supreme, prowl-
ing the streets of Indonesia
on the lookout for anyone
who might dare to defy a
decade-old anti-pornography law.
They makes arrests for even the
most trivial violations – women wear-
ing skirts with hems more than ten
centimetres above the ankle, and
people uttering the word “naked”, re-
gardless of the context. The guilty are
banished to a remote uninhabited
island in the Indonesian archipelago.
Little do the authorities know, how-
ever, that this is there where the seeds
of a revolution will be planted.
This “Big Brother” scenario is the
basic plot of the upcoming musical
Onrop! (porno spelled backwards) by
Indonesian film director Joko Anwar.
Now in production, Onrop! is a sa-
tirical take on the political and social
controversies connected to pornog-
raphy in Indonesia, the world’s larg-
est Muslim-majority nation but also
a secular one.
One such event was the uproar
surrounding the publication of a
toned-down Indonesian edition of
Playboy magazine in 2006, which
prompted angry militants to trash the
publisher’s offices in the name of
quashing pornography even though
the magazine didn’t contain any-
thing close to nudity.
But that was just a warm up to the
‘Young Obama’ in trouble playing left-handed table tennis
......................................................
INDONESIA
Associated Press in Bandung
Young Barry Obama is struggling
with his table tennis shots. Or rather,
Hasan Faruq Ali is struggling to play
left-handed in imitation of the char-
acter he is portraying in the Indone-
sian film Little Obama.
“Hasan has the walk, he has the
posture of Barry,” said Slamet Dja-
nuadi, a consultant on the film and a
childhood friend of US President Ba-
rack Obama when he lived in Indo-
nesia from 1967 to 1971. “But Barry
was a better ping-pong player.”
The movie, produced by Multivi-
sion Plus, Indonesia’s largest produc-
tion company, will premiere in Indo-
nesia on June 17, the week of Oba-
ma’s anticipated visit to the country.
The president postponed a planned
visit in March to push through health
care legislation.
The film tells the story of Obama’s
childhood in Jakarta, where he lived
with his mother and Indonesian
stepfather from the ages of six to 10.
“It’s about his friendships, his
hobbies, just a childhood story,” said
controversial 2008 Anti-Pornogra-
phy Law, an early draft of which
would have had violators serving up
to 10 years in jail for kissing in public.
Not to be left out, religious police
in the staunchly Muslim province of
Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra
Island, banned women from wearing
“tight clothes” last year. Around the
same time, Information Minister
Tifatul Sembiring blamed the fre-
quent earthquakes and natural disas-
ters in Indonesia on immorality, and
in February he suggested forming a
special team to block websites con-
taining pornographic materials.
And earlier this month, there were
protests by hard-line Islamic groups
against the premiere of an Indone-
sian comedy featuring Japanese porn
star Maria “Miyabi” Ozawa. The
groups aborted the protests, and
plans to trash any movie theatre
showing the film after finding out it
contained no sex scenes or nudity.
So what’s the fuss about?
Indonesia is theoretically a con-
servative Asian society, but dig below
the surface and there’s the same
amount of sex, lies and video tape as
in any other nation.
Joko said there is much hypocrisy
attached to the pornography debate,
as political and religious elements
within society have made the word
taboo without any clear standards or
even a simple definition.
screenwriter and co-director Da-
mien Dematra. “It’s not about poli-
tics; it’s just the story of a boy.”
Hasan, who was born in the Unit-
ed States but has lived in Indonesia
since he was about two years old, was
an obvious casting choice to play the
young Obama.
Fluent in English and the Bahasa
Indonesia language, and the son of a
white mother and African-American
father, Hasan appeared perfect
Improving his table-tennis game
was the focus during breaks on the
fifth day of filming, earlier this week.
Day four’s challenge was boxing, a
childhood pursuit the president has
said he learned from his stepfather
and one with which Hasan, with
three years of karate training, felt
more comfortable.
“It feels great to play Obama,” the
novice actor said with a grin. “I was
shy about it at first and there are some
new difficulties that you have to work
to get over, with intense practice, like
this” – gesturing toward the table on
the lawn – “and just learning the lines,
practicing the scenes.
“But then it became easy and fun,
especially acting as a very important
They said it looked
like the women were
in a threesome.
People have such
dirty minds
......................................................
Joko Anwar,
Indonesian filmmaker
character who left here to become
president.”
The main setting for the movie is a
colonial-era house on the outskirts of
Bandung, a city famed for its colonial
architecture amid lush hilltops about
180km southeast of Jakarta.
Directors John de Rantau and De-
matra chose the city because it re-
sembled Jakarta in the 1970s. Oba-
ma’s old home in the Jakarta neigh-
bourhood of Menteng is now sur-
rounded by tall apartment blocks
and is too urban.
The movie is taken from Dema-
tra’s book Obama Anak Menteng
(Obama, the Menteng Kid) a fiction-
alised biography based on interviews
with about 30 old friends and neigh-
bours.
It is the first in a planned trilogy
about Obama in Indonesia.
The second book is to focus on his
education at a Catholic school and
the third on his relationship with his
mother.
“I just felt that this guy is an extra-
ordinary person,” Dematra said.
“The reason I’m doing this is I want
people around the world to know
that Obama can become who he
“We can easily buy porn DVDs,
which are literally sold on the streets
[in many Indonesian cities]. There
are also no rating restrictions at mov-
ie theatres, so children can watch
movies that should only be viewed by
adults,” he said, adding that back in
the 1990s, titillating locally produced
films with narratives about promis-
cuous sex and adultery dominated
the cinema.
Now, filmmakers like Joko face
tight censorship regarding sex and
nudity, but again, with no clear stan-
dards. A kissing scene made the cut in
one of his films, but not in another. It
depends on who at the government’s
Film Censor Board is on duty on any
given day.
Bloody, violent scenes, however,
have a lot easier time passing the cen-
sors than kissing or sex scenes, as
gory locally produced horror films
are extremely popular.
Joko said some censors saw por-
nography where there was not the
slightest intention to depict it. A post-
er for one of his films, a thriller called
Forbidden Door, was banned be-
cause the picture of a man strangling
a woman was deemed sexual.
Another movie poster he made for
a friend’s documentary was also
banned on similar grounds. “The
poster has a picture of an egg on the
tip of an animal horn, which is an il-
lustration of an Indonesian proverb
is because of his background in
Indonesia.
“The different religions and races,
the pressures that he had. I want the
film to inspire people.”
Two of Obama’s old friends, Dja-
nuadi and his brother, Yuniadi,
whose family shared a house with
Obama’s, are coaching Hasan on
everything from sports to Obama’s
relationships with his mother and
stepfather.
“It takes us back to the past, teach-
ing Hasan and remembering the
games we played together, flying
kites, Monopoly, puzzles,” Djanuadi
said. “Barry would probably like this
movie for the same reasons, to recall
his memories.”
Hasan, the child actor, is not quite
as chubby as Obama was, Djanuadi
and his brother say, despite his efforts
to grow into his character by eating
extra meals and giving up karate
practice.
Now in costume – muddied
shorts and T-shirt and a bandage
around his leg from a playground
scuffle the fictional Obama had –
Hasan waits for his next scene to be
filmed, dribbling a soccer ball like a
that means ‘living on the edge’. In-
side the egg were three women in the
fetal position. The censorship board
said it looked like those women were
engaging in a threesome. People
have such dirty minds,” he said,
shaking his head.
Hari Nugroho, head of the sociol-
ogy department at the University of
Indonesia, said curiosity about por-
nography was common the world
over. However, the Indonesian para-
dox, in which pornography is at once
viewed as deeply immoral yet is
widely available, was more common
in conservative societies where sexu-
ality is repressed by religion.
“Cultural tradition alone does not
necessarily repress sexuality,” he
said. “In a conservative society like
this, the attempt to draw sexuality
away from the public sphere is stron-
ger than in a more liberal society,
where the expression of sexuality in
public is an individual right.”
Nugroho said there was a tug of
war underway within Indonesian so-
ciety on the issue. The struggle began
following the collapse of the New
Order regime of the late dictator
Suharto in 1998, which dramatically
opened space for democracy and
individual expression, including
sexually suggestive art, movies and
magazines.
Ironically during Suharto’s au-
thoritarian regime, racy films were all
John De Rantau and Hasan Faruq Ali filming Little Obama. Photo: AP
basketball and pretending to shoot at
an imaginary basket.
“President!” the director calls out,
amid laughter, summoning Hasan to
the living room for his next take. Over
and over, for nearly an hour, he car-
ries a soccer ball into the room, call-
ing out for his parents before meeting
them in the hallway and looking dis-
tressed upon seeing they’ve been ar-
guing. Finally, after several takes, it’s
a wrap.
SATURDAY, MAY 22, 2010 SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
the rage. “The country is now more
democratic, but does not have suffi-
cient tools to regulate pornographic
materials. The state then leaves the
argument up to proponents who
enjoy wealth from pornography-
related businesses, and the oppo-
nents who want to uphold religious
and ‘Eastern morality’ values,”
Nugroho said.
Other stakeholders in the debate
include liberal Indonesians, and sup-
porters of women’s rights and the
protection of women. Indonesian
women’s groups generally support
regulations against pornography al-
though they argue that the laws
against pornography and immorality
unfairly target women.
Activist Andy Yentriyanti, an exec-
utive at the National Commission on
Violence Against Women, said there
are three groups that suffer the most
amid the controversy over pornogra-
phy: ethnic and religious minorities,
women and artists.
The Anti-Pornography Law, she
said, was theoretically intended to
crack down on the distribution of
pornographic materials. But after op-
portunistic politicians and conserva-
tive religious groups were through
with their proposals, the law was ex-
panded to include a set of regulations
that focus on morality.
The law defines pornography as
“sexual material made by people in
Shakur Ali, Hasan’s father,
watched from a window. He said the
first time he watched Hasan act, it
brought tears to his eyes.
“I was shocked to see the change,
to see him become this person,” said
Ali, who has not followed US politics
and said it didn’t matter to him that
his son was playing Obama but just
that he was following his dream of
being a performer.
Cara Lachelle, a South African-
the forms of pictures, sketches, illus-
trations, photos, writings, voice,
sounds, motion pictures, animation,
cartoons, poems, conversations,
body movements and other forms of
communication through various
mass media or public displays that
can arouse sexual desires and/or vio-
late public moral values”.
For example, under the law, nude
Balinese art or images of native
tribespeople in Papua province can
be considered pornographic. Des-
pite the apparent flaws, Indonesia’s
Constitutional Court has struck
down challenges to the anti-pornog-
raphy law by dozens of different
groups. “Indonesia is a very diverse
country culturally, and the law wants
to make it uniform. This is unconsti-
tutional,” Yentriyanti said, adding
that the commission was lobbying to
ensure better implementation of its
regulations.
Joko said people were so obsessed
with the “porn” buzz word that they
forgot about other important na-
tional issues, including endemic cor-
ruption within the country’s govern-
ment, legislature and judiciary, and
widespread poverty.
“Or perhaps focusing on pornog-
raphy is the shortcut to show people
that [politicians] are working. I mean,
what’s the worst thing could happen
from pornography? Corruption is
much worse,” he said.
born actress, said she took her role as
Obama’s mother seriously.
“His mum was so strong, she
knew her son would be put through
hardship and she helped him
through that,” Lachelle said.
“I am very careful about the way I
portray her, to do justice to them
both.”
Indonesian actor Eko Noah plays
Lolo Soetoro, Obama’s stepfather.
The directors hope to finish
shooting on June 3, in time for its
scheduled premiere.
Everyone involved hopes Obama
will watch it, including the directors,
actors and the childhood neighbours
– the same ones who played ping-
pong with him for hours.
As for Hasan, he said he carried
two things from the movie, the inspi-
ration to follow his dreams and
Obama’s smile.
“Before, I was a guy that kept to
myself. But in acting, I’m trying to be
like the guy in the pictures, who looks
like he likes to be around friends and
is always smiling,” Hasan said. “And
now, even when I’m not acting, I
can’t help it but I definitely notice I
smile a lot more.”