The Boy and The Voyager (Fajar dan Penjelajah Samudera)
2024 · 14m · Indonesia
Directed by Haris Supiandi, Teguh Yanu Priyatna
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
After his mother leaves to work as a migrant laborer in Malaysia, a young boy named Fajar lives with his grandfather on the West Kalimantan coast, clinging to a folk belief that releasing his pet turtle into the sea will bring his loved ones home.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone wants to make the immigrant heartbreak film, but Supiandi and Priyatna slip a folk-magic premise under the realism and actually get away with it—the turtle becomes a genuine point of tension, not metaphor decoration, which is exactly the kind of structural weirdness that shouldn't work but does.
The restraint here sits in a lineage of Southeast Asian cinema that trusts silence and coastal imagery to do the narrative work; the editing resists easy emotional beats, letting the grandfather-grandson dynamic breathe in long takes that recall the formal patience of Weerasethakul.
The decision to let the boy's belief and the mother's labor crisis occupy the same emotional register without resolving into either fantasy or pure realism—that refusal to collapse one into the other—is what makes a modest budget and a 13-minute window feel like enough canvas.
Reviews
Karya sineas Kalbar wakili Indonesia di Malmo Film Festival — film tentang persahabatan dan keluarga yang terinspirasi dari wilayah pesisir Kalimantan Barat tempat penyu hidup.
Shortlisted Film: The Boy and The Voyager — a tender Indonesian short selected for the CinemaSHORT Asian Short Film Competition.
Festivals
- CinemaSHORT Asian Short Film Competition 2025
- BUFF Malmö Film Festival 2025