From the looks of Cineplex 21 or Blitzmegaplex the quality and content of Indonesian movies are slowly improving, don’t you agree? Its quality of production, acting, cinematography and others has improved in the last 10 years. Not to mention the content of a movie, the flow of the story or the quality of its scriptwriting, topics that’s being raised in the movie has improved with a more sophisticated approach to express into a movie. However it will always be sidelined by other movies, mainly by Hollywood movies which is more commercial and scopes a larger market in Indonesia and other Indonesian movies..

In 2009, an article was published on discussing the improvement of Indonesian Film Industry, Ministry of Trade Mari E Pangestu was interviews by Media Indonesia newspaper, she compared Indonesia to country such as India and Thailand ‘In most countries, the creative industry has improved significantly. Such as India, they’ve successfully produced a lot of their national films and exported to other countries’. I personally think Indonesian films can’t be categorized in the same degree as India in the Film Industry, you see, India is famous for their Bollywood movies, it stands out for its different ways of expressing its culture in a movie, such as the involvement of the traditional dances in just about any genre of drama, romance or comedy, maybe even horror.

And we can’t really say that Indonesian have a ‘term’ to define its own type of cinema, except maybe horror or cult genre movies? but do we really want to export just about any Indonesian horror or cult movies with its lack of quality?

Since 2001 until 2011, we could see the rapid increase in quantity of Indonesian movies, not to mention the number of horror movies every year. I personally think that there’s this obsession that Indonesian have with horror stories, no matter the quality of the production. Through a documentary by Mondo Macabro titled ‘Indonesian Exploitation Cinema‘, we could see that there’s indeed an obsession with old folk-stories that involves the use of supernatural, horror figures thats quite popular in Indonesia.

From the statistics shown by Film Indonesia, we could see the increase numbers of Indonesian movies yearly, and which movie is the most popular in the numbers of audiences. From that statistic we could see a pattern of every year, the number one movie with the highest audiences is either a horror movie or a movie that exposes religion/cultural beliefs. With a large market sector divided between working class, it had created a gap of different tastes in movies for most Indonesians. I think it would be better if there’s a movie where those who writes significant horror script collaborate with a great director and a trustable cinematographer, don’t you think?

The Indonesian Film Industry could create a whole new market with its own unique identity, such as India’s Bollywood, or Thailand’s horror movies. With Indonesia’s vast array of cultures and traditions, and by having all of the people who are highly involved in the Indonesian film industry collaborate they could achieve a higher accomplishment of better storyline, direction, cinematography, to attract more Indonesians to watch Indonesian movies.