FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2025

Kelas Liarsip collective’s first project traces the work and life story of Indonesia’s pioneering woman film director Ratna Asmara (1913 - 1968). It was initiated with the support of public broadcasting platform for arts and culture Indonesiana TV.

This project expands the acknowledgement for women’s works in the moving image heritage. Since Indonesia’s publicly funded film heritage program was initiated in the form digitisation and restoration in 2014, only ONE work from women directors was included. Ratna Asmara’s ‘Dr. Samsi’ (1952), the subject of this research, is the second one.

The documented numbers of women directors remained below 2 percent within the moving image industry. This scarcity is very much reflected in the silences and absences in the archives. Due to lack of recognition, their works are left with minimal attention and care, leading to advanced chemical decay. The erasure of their traces progresses slowly and steadily over decades of limited civic spaces to research history - following decades of military regime’s censorship which is being revived by the country’s newly elected administration.

In this presentation, Kelas Liarsip will share a reflection of this collaborative project. Tracing Ratna Asmara provides a chance to question this erasure and explore methods of overcoming it. This research looks into the margins of established archives and searches through non-institutional sources. To study Asmara’s work approaches, Kelas Liarsip created digitisation and restoration workflows for 35mm film elements found in Jakarta, Indonesia. Acknowledging limitations of locally available technological resources, collaborative approaches were developed by moving image archivists and post-production technicians, mindfully using digital workflow in creating access copies and restoration. The process was documented in a series ‘Devising Ratna Asmara’ which was co-produced by Indonesiana TV, facilitating the assembly of a women-led creative team.