Investors Should Buy a Ticket to Indonesia
A burgeoning middle class, and investment and expertise from overseas, are reviving the country’s once-thriving film sector.
On the set of the film "Sin" in Jakarta.
Photographer: Dimas Ardian/BloombergIt’s not Bollywood yet, but Indonesia could be germinating Asia’s next big film scene. After years of stifled growth and censorship, new cinemas are opening across the vast Southeast Asian archipelago at a rapid clip thanks to large cash investments. Meanwhile, international filmmakers are setting up operations. With local production houses and cinema owners taking their companies public, investors might want to pay attention.
While movies have been produced in Indonesia since the 1920s, early efforts were unpopular with local audiences. Japanese occupiers during World War II banned film production and, in later years, only films approved by the government made it to the screen. As a result, most Indonesian movies in the 1950s and ’60s were lackluster and dogmatic. The 1980s saw the release of successful films such as “Pintar Pintar Bodoh” (1982) and “Tjoet Nja’Dhien” (1988), the first Indonesian movie to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival. But independent filmmaking slumped again in the 1990s and early 2000s.