Before, Now & Then (2023)
Director: Kamila Andini Run Time: 103 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2022
Starring: Arswendi Nasution, Happy Salma, Ibnu Jamil, Laura Basuki, Rieke Dyah Pitaloka
Country: Indonesia
Language: Indonesian with English subtitles
About the film:
World Premiere at the 2022 Berlin Film Festival, where Laura Basuki was awarded Silver Bear for Best Supporting Performance for her performance as Ino.
Set amid the political violence of late-1960s Indonesia, Kamila Andini’s intoxicating film Before, Now & Then follows Nana, the beautiful wife of a wealthy plantation owner whose inner life remains with her deceased first husband, murdered in the civil war a decade prior. A survivor, Nana values her safety and material comforts, but carries out a haunted existence, dreaming of her lost love. Forced to confront her husband’s blatant infidelity, Nana makes an unusual connection with his younger mistress, Ino. The two women, sharing their secrets and desires, discover a newfound freedom and intimacy withheld from them both by the strictures of patriarchal society.
“wreathed in poetic melancholy and never less than beautiful”
—Stephanie Bunbury, Deadline
Framed by elegant cinematography and a lush score, Before, Now & Then is a lyrical, transporting character study in the lineage of Wong Kar-wai and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
About the filmmaker:
Kamila Andini is a mother, filmmaker, and stage director based in Jakarta, Indonesia. Concerns with social culture, gender equality and environmental issues led to her passion to make films with a distinctive narrative perspective. Her debut feature film The Mirror Never Lies (2011) recounts the life of sea nomad on the Pacific Ocean off Indonesia. Her second, The Seen and Unseen (2017) portrays a dualistic cinematic universe based on the Balinese philosophical concept of Sekala/Niskala. Both films have screened in over 50 film festivals around the world and received some 30 national and international awards, including the Grand Prix for Best Feature Film, Berlinale Generation Kplus in 2018. Her third feature, Yuni, (2021) won the Platform Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival. Before, Now & Then (2023) is Andini’s fourth feature film.
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