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Summary

In 1965 six generals were killed in Indonesia, and the Communist party was blamed for organizing the conspiracy that led to the deaths. The result: under General Suharto hundreds of thousands of people were imprisoned and executed as suspected Communists or Communist sympathizers. Ibrahim Kadir, a traditional poet from the village of Takengon, was accused of being a Communist activist and imprisoned for 28 days. A Poet tells the true story of this didong poet (didong is a style of poetic ballad originating from Gayo, Central Aceh). Kadir was a living witness to the mass killings of an estimated 500,000 suspected communists by brutal military force. After his release from prison, his humanistic poems provided an eyewitness account to the brutal killings of that period. In Nugroho’s startling dramatic feature, which uses Kadir as a Ceh, or leader of a didong group, re-enactment is combined with dramatic monologue as Kadir plays himself, a detainee with an uncertain future who witnesses the anguish of those awaiting their execution. The film is shot entirely inside the tight space of incarceration—two prison cells and the guard's foyer—with the director being the other story-teller. Nugroho works the camera and sound, song and dance to reveal fear of (and communal resistance to) decimation by military might. The majority of the actors are from Takengon, and are non-professionals whose families experienced this remembered tragedy firsthand.

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