Pram Melawan! / Pram Resists! / Pram resists!

Film Screening with Discussion

This film shows intergenerational and interpersonal collective interpretations about the literature works of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, which have been translated from Bahasa Indonesia into more than 40 other languages. Indonesian and German readers living in Germany were interviewed by ways of recording themselves freely.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer (6 February 1925 – 30 April 2006) was an Indonesian writer and an influential member of the left-leaning cultural organisation LEKRA. The bloody regime of Soeharto put him in jail for 14 years without trial, first in some prisons on Java and then, from 1969 in the penal colony on the island of Buru, where his main body of work, a tetralogy of novels, was born. Through his tetralogy and other works, the Indonesian younger generations learn about what have made the 1945 Revolution possible, including the many-sided emancipation of women against feudalism-and-colonialism.

his film was initiated also as a collective effort to revisit the black period of Indonesian history surrounding the 1965 genocide and unruly imprisonment of communists and their supporters, including Pramoedya as one of the victims. But making this film is also a way of weaving hopes among different generations. A song from the Dialita Choir, consisting of women who survived the 1965 tragedy and the New Order prisons, is used in this film: Salam Harapan/ Greetings of Hope.

Production: Indonesian Community Association in Germany (PMIJ), September 2025
Language: Bahasa Indonesia and German, with english subtitles