Mayday! May day! Mayday!

The Mambesak Group was active in Jayapura from 1978 to 1984. After the murder of Arnold Ap in 1984, the group, whose members were dominated by students from various regions in Papua, disbanded. Gradually, the ideas of Mambesak began to fade. With a cinema varite narrative style, this film tries to articulate the traces of the ideas of Arnold Ap and the Mambesak Group as mediators between their generation and the traces of their ancestors and Papuan culture.

West Java, in current-day Indonesia, was home to the Sundanese Kingdom that flourished for over nine centuries, yet few physical traces remain today that sing of its glory. Nestled in a geologically sensitive zone, the region has long been subject to nature’s unabated fury, with periodic earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions wiping out its heritage and reducing it to a “landscape of amnesia”.

After his adoptive father returned to the Netherlands, the film director opened his diary and discovered personal stories that he didn’t know existed. Stories about love, armed conflict, and colonialism are told through the eyes of a man named Soebertono Mote a.k.a Father Bert Hagendoorn.