Indonesian and Queensland filmmakers make horror shorts in cross-cultural program

Indonesian and regional Queensland filmmakers made short horror films together in Indonesia and Australia through a University of Southern Queensland program, ABC News reported. The collaboration gave filmmakers outside Australia’s major production centres a chance to work across cultures, with horror as their common genre.

The group spent a week filming in Indonesia before continuing production in Toowoomba, west of Brisbane, according to ABC. The Australian filmmakers came from Cairns, Mackay and the Sunshine Coast. ABC identified Indonesian filmmaker Ivan Mosqueda and director of photography Juan Satiadarma among the participants.

How the horror filmmaking project is funded

The program has a reported $60,000 budget from UniSQ and Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. UniSQ’s profile of Putnam identifies her work on a department-funded cross-cultural filmmaking project examining creative partnerships between Australian and Indonesian filmmakers through horror cinema.

Putnam told ABC she hoped the project would lead to more creative partnerships between the countries and reduce dependence on financing from the United States.

What the filmmakers found in each country’s horror

Mosqueda told ABC that Indonesian horror often draws on religion and traditional beliefs. In Australia, he said, the wilderness and its large empty spaces can provide the fear. His comparison points to different local material the filmmakers could bring to the same genre.

For Sunshine Coast filmmaker Amy Parry, the project was also a rare funding opportunity for regional creatives. She told ABC it had been ‘a whirlwind’, but expressed concern that regional filmmakers would be hit first by state government cuts of at least $13 million a year to Screen Queensland over the next two years. That concern puts the program’s small budget in the context of wider pressure on the state’s film funding.