Indonesian filmmaker Edwin on his big win at Locarno Film Festival for pulp movie Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash and its message about his country’s machismo

More often than not a film that is a cocktail of vengeance, bloody fist fights and crude machismo is a cult hit rather than a festival award winner.

But on August 14, Indonesian director Edwin proved everyone wrong when his latest feature, Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, not only had its world premiere at Switzerland’s prestigious Locarno Film Festival but also snared the top honour, the Golden Leopard, in its International Competition.

“I’m super happy. The award comes at a very good time,” Edwin said in an interview with the Post, after becoming the first Indonesian filmmaker to win the first prize in the festival’s 74-year history. “It gives a lot of people hope, which is something we really need right now, to feel alive in these crazy times.”

Co-produced by Indonesia’s Palari Films, Singapore’s Phoenix and E&W Films, and Germany’s The Match Factory and Bombero International, Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash is Edwin’s fifth feature film.

His debut feature Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly (2008) won prizes at the 3 Continents festival in Nantes, France, Taipei’s Golden Horse Awards, and Rotterdam’s International Film Festival. His second feature, Postcards from the Zoo (2012), competed at the 62nd Berlin Film Festival, and Posesif (2017) won the Citra Award, Indonesia’s most important film award, in 2017.

Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash is adapted from the novel of the same name by Eka Kurniawan, the first Indonesian author to be nominated for the Man Booker International Prize in 2016, who co-wrote the script with Edwin.

“Our process of [sending drafts] back and forth created discussion and a lot of understanding between us,” he says. “We realised that the medium is different, so we explored the cinematic possibilities that came from our interpretation of the book’s spirit.”

The film is a mishmash of genres, from Hong Kong’s martial arts movies to Indonesian horror and American juvenile delinquent and prison B-movies.

Marthino Lio stars as fighter Ajo Kawir, the “champion of Bojongsoang”, a village in West Java. Ajo constantly works himself into a rage that masks a not-so-well concealed secret: he can’t “get it up”.

“The word ‘impotence’ was very familiar among teens, a boogie man that was scarier than cancer, HIV or all other ghouls,” says Edwin, who was born in 1978 in Surabaya and grew up in times he remembers as “the glory days of a military regime”.

The film’s photography and lettering are delightfully retro and bring suburban Indonesia to life in all of its tropical decadence. Beneath the gritty facade of an exploitation film, however, Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash pulls no punches in condemning Indonesian society’s toxic masculinity and patriarchal values.

“Violence towards women, or all other kinds of violence, is somewhat excusable [in Indonesia] when you knew the man was frustrated by his ‘incapacity’,” says the director.

Early in the film, Ajo has a chance to finally chase happiness and exit that vicious circle of violence when he meets a tough female fighter, Iteung (played by Ladya Cheryl). She almost beats him senseless before he overpowers her, and needless to say falls in love with her.

“Normalised violence is the root of all violence that we are facing nowadays. I don’t want people to forget our dark days that were full of machismo s**t,” Edwin says. “It’s not so long ago that people were missing, raped, and killed for the price of democracy, and we never dared to talk about it until now. We can be better by not forgetting.”

Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash’s win reflects the new course pursued by the Locarno Film Festival’s artistic director, Giona Nazzaro, who wants to make it more audience-friendly by spiking its menu of art-house cinema with comedies and genre films. Not incidentally, the festival’s lifetime achievement award this year went to Dario Argento, the Italian master of the horror subgenre of giallo.

“Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash is my and Eka’s tribute to our love of popular cinema and, as it’s quite universal, I believe it can speak to both local and international audiences,” says Edwin. “[Since] Hong Kong martial arts action movies and American B-movies are [as widespread as] the Covid-19 pandemic, everybody should be familiar with their taste.”

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