Always Until Victory (Bersama Membangun Negeri)
2022 · 12m · Indonesia
Directed by Deo Mahameru
Tones: darkly comic, provocative
During an Indonesian election season, a legislative candidate shooting a tear-jerker campaign video in a Jakarta slum grows increasingly desperate when the elderly widow she has cast as the face of poverty refuses — or fails — to cry on cue.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A satire that actually *works* by refusing to punch down—the real subject isn't the widow's tears or the slum, it's the candidate's weaponized sincerity, and that T-shirt is doing more ideological work than most manifestos.
Mahameru locates himself in a lineage of political cinema that interrogates performance and authenticity, achieving a formal precision where every blocked shot and held silence becomes an argument about who gets to be seen.
The entire film pivots on the cameraman staying perfectly still in that RATM shirt while chaos spirals around him—it's a single compositional choice that transforms the satire from obvious to genuinely unsettling.
Reviews
Sindiran untuk calon-calon politisi agar tidak lagi menggunakan teknik menjual kesedihan sebagai alat kampanyenya.
Festivals
- Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival 2023