Nautical
2023 · 15m · Indonesia
Directed by Nanda Rahmadya
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, romance
Tones: contemplative, tender, tense
Zahra, a third-semester law student preparing the financial accountability report for a campus event, must choose between protecting Bimo, the senior she has feelings for, and her own commitment to honesty when she discovers irregularities in the books.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the anti-corruption film to be a sermon; Rahmadya stages it as a whisper between two people over spreadsheets, which is infinitely weirder and more dangerous than the usual righteousness.
The film inherits a lineage of ethical cinema—Haneke, the Dardennes—but grounds its moral inquiry in the specific texture of Indonesian institutional life and campus intimacy, refusing both sentimentality and didacticism.
The pivot point is Zahra's hand hovering over the keyboard before she corrects the numbers; that single moment of tactile hesitation—the weight of a keystroke—does the work of a thirty-page script about integrity.
Festivals
- ACFFest (Anti Corruption Film Festival) 2023