This film is part of the Shorts Presentation: HERE WE ARE shorts programme.
Canada, Indonesia202321 minIndonesian, Mandarin, Dutch with English subtitlesDrama
In a post-New Order Jakarta, native Indonesians (Pribumi) are legalized to perform the black magic ritual babi ngepet to balance their economy against Chinese Indonesians.
*Andrea Nirmala Widjajanto
Andrea Nirmala Widjajanto is an Indonesian writer and director currently residing in Toronto. Her works explore genre films as a medium to depict current political, social, and cultural issues.
This film is part of the Shorts Presentation: HERE WE ARE shorts programme.
Hmm … this doesn’t seem right?! This programme asks us to sit with the discomforting feelings that arise when we begin to confront the unknown in what we believe to know.
At the heart of Baby Queen is a tender and joyful relationship between Singaporean drag queen Opera Tang and her 90-year-old grandmother, who makes many of her performance costumes.
When Azra, a queer Muslim grad student, hears of her father’s sudden death, she flies back to her ancestral home in Karachi, Pakistan for the funeral, where she is received by her conservative mother, Mariam, perpetually disappointed by Azra’s choices. As a self-assured Azra wrestles with Karachi’s customs and norms, we time travel back to Mariam’s own life in the city 30 years ago, a remarkably different era in Pakistan’s political and cultural history.
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