A film about Sako, an eccentric Indonesian man with Chinese roots. Sako is struggling with his past. He is traumatized because of the murder of his innocent father, who was one of the approximately half to a million alleged communists that were killed in the transition period to the Suharto regime in Indonesia in 1965. Besides communists, a number of farmers, unionists and Chinese were also among the victims. Sadly, this brutal period is still taboo in Indonesia and what makes it more painful for Sako is that during this time, he supported the responsible regime. To break the taboo and process his trauma, Sako ventured out with his camcorder and filmed people close to him and talked with them about their experiences related to this past.

biografia

Machiel van den Heuvel started his film career at the University of Amsterdam where he followed the documentary course POLDOX. He continued his film education and studied Film Directing’at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent. In his films, he is looking for content in stories and personalities that somehow reflect his inner life and also have a universal appeal. This content has a few recurring themes which involves in particular: the search for meaning in life; issues of injustice; the strife for an ideal self or world and a feeling that can be described as a mood of weariness or sadness about the existence of evil and suffering in the world.

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