Inside ‘Next Step Studio Indonesia’ Shorts at Cannes Critics’ Week

There is a moment, somewhere between exchanging favorite films and confronting each other’s psyche, where two strangers from different countries have to decide whether they can actually make something together. For the eight directors at the center of “Next Step Studio Indonesia 2026,” that moment arrived last year in Jakarta. The result, screening in Cannes’ Critics’ Week, will be visible to the world: four short films, each co-written and co-directed by one Indonesian filmmaker and one counterpart from elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

The program is the first Indonesian edition of Next Step Studio, a traveling initiative that began as La Factory at the Filmmaker’s Fortnight in 2013 and has since rotated annually through different countries. Its creator, producer Dominique Welinski, designed it around a specific conviction: that the compressed, cross-cultural process of co-writing and co-directing with a stranger is itself a form of filmmaker training that no lab or residency quite replicates. “More than 80 directors have gone through this program since 2013, most of them did their first feature and did open in big festivals,” Welinski says. Alumni whose trajectories bear that out include Manuela Martelli, whose “The Meltdown” premieres in Un Certain Regard at this year’s Cannes, Urska Djukic, whose “Little Trouble Girl” played Berlin 2025 and Tan Siyou, whose “Amoeba” screened at Toronto 2025.

“It took us more than two years to convince them that Indonesia deserves to be the country of focus, and we are delighted that we can finally present four short films by these eight directors at Critics’ Week,” say Yulia Evina Bhara and Amerta Kusuma, the KawanKawan Media producers behind the program.

The four pairings are: Reza Fahriyansyah with Ananth Subramaniam of Malaysia on “Holy Crowd,” a resurrection narrative that tips into collective hysteria; Shelby Kho with Sein Lyan Tun of Myanmar on “Original Wound,” a study of siblings negotiating conflicting memories of a controlling mother; Reza Rahadian with Sam Manacsa of the Philippines on “Annisa,” a portrait of a blind teenager finding her voice during a neighborhood national day celebration; and Khozy Rizal with Lam Li Shuen of Singapore on “Mothers Are Mothering,” a hallucinatory account of a woman in an abusive marriage reaching for escape. All four were shot in Jakarta, and none of them softens its subject matter.

“Complete creative freedom — that’s non-negotiable for the kind of cinema we want to make,” Bhara and Kusuma say. “The directors brought difficult material because that’s where their honest impulses led them, and our job as producers is to make sure they have the conditions to handle it well.”

The collaboration process was rarely frictionless, and the directors are candid about what that friction felt like. Fahriyansyah and Subramaniam found early common ground in a shared exhaustion with the same tension — the way faith and community in Southeast Asia can tip from something intimate into something authoritarian — and “Holy Crowd” grew from that alignment. Their differences surfaced in execution: how specific religious imagery should read on screen, how far toward exaggeration or restraint any given scene should go. “Those clashes were productive,” Subramaniam says. “They forced us to constantly question our assumptions, and instead of resolving them we found ways to let both differences exist within the film.”

Fahriyansyah describes a set discipline that cut through the noise of those differences. “Whenever we hit a crossroads under time pressure, we’d just strip everything back and ask: What is the character feeling right now, and what do we want the audience to feel?” he says. The surrealism in “Holy Crowd” — a risen woman sits silent in her coffin while the village around her immediately starts to monetize and regulate the miracle — never overwhelms the human logic beneath it. “That, to me, is where the surreal lives,” Subramaniam says. “Not in the resurrection itself, but in how quickly everyone agrees to behave like it makes sense.”

For Kho and Lyan Tun, the co-writing process on “Original Wound” began from a different place: a shared inquiry into personal trauma that made the process itself feel uncomfortably close to the material. “When you have a scar, you keep looking and picking at it – it’s there and you can’t ignore it,” Kho says. “The writing had already begun on our skin.” Lyan Tun found that the tensions that emerged on set, the moments when their different instincts about how to respond to an unexpected problem collided, ultimately shaped the film’s texture. “Collaboration is not about compromise alone, but about creating something new together,” he says. The film’s central tension — that two siblings hold irreconcilable versions of the same past, neither fully correct — was built into the performances deliberately. “Each character holds a different version of the truth, and neither is fully complete,” Lyan Tun says.

“Annisa” came together through a different kind of intimacy: Rahadian already knew the real Anissa, the blind teenager at the story’s center, and brought her story to Manacsa as the starting point for their collaboration. “When Reza shared with me the story of Anissa, whom he had met, it intrigued me so much that I wanted to hear more about her,” Manacsa says. The film’s key formal decision — to anchor everything in sound rather than complicated visual strategies — followed from that. “The soundscape of the environment becomes full and collective, even as she sits there quiet and contemplative,” Manacsa says. For Rahadian, the program carries stakes beyond any single film. “Next Step Studio gives stories from Indonesia and Southeast Asia the chance to be heard and discussed more widely,” he says. “This collaboration is also an opportunity for us as fellow Southeast Asian filmmakers to communicate with one another.”

“Mothers Are Mothering” brought together Rizal’s deeply personal source material — drawn from his own conversations with his mother about the struggles of living as a woman in a conservative environment — and Li Shuen’s taste for sci-fi allegory and surreal texture. Li Shuen, who says she is accustomed to co-directing through her long-running filmmaking partnership with her husband, Mark Chua, found the collaboration with Rizal natural from the start. “Khozy brought a deeply personal story, and I brought the strange, otherworldly sci-fi lens through which these experiences could be allegorized,” she says. “Together, the story developed into something that could speak to very real and painful issues that women face through fantasy and surreal humour.” Rizal describes a creative dynamic that rarely required adjudication. “It was always easy to lay everything out and talk it through,” he says. “We’re kind of on the same wavelength — equally insane, with pretty much the same taste in everything.”

For Bhara and Kusuma, the artistic results are only part of the point. The producers are frank about the structural problem that makes a program like this necessary. Indonesia produces around 200 films a year, but the pool of producers equipped to navigate international co-productions is, by their estimate, 10 to 15 deep. Gap financing barely exists locally. There is no tax rebate scheme comparable to Thailand’s. Arthouse projects are still assembled the old way — a patchwork of European public funds, Asian funds, and local matching, each piece signaling credibility to the next financier. “The opportunity is real,” Bhara and Kusuma say. “The risk is that the momentum passes before the infrastructure catches up.”

That tension shapes how KawanKawan frames this program — not just as a showcase but as a structural intervention. The films have Rediance on board as international sales agent from day one, a head start most short films never get. Welinski has built the Cannes premiere around structured industry access: meetings with festival programmers and potential co-producers designed to generate working relationships, not just visibility. “Out of the very experience of co-writing and co-directing with someone you don’t know, from another country, speaking another language and a different culture, I hope the program was helpful somehow in the financing process,” Welinski says.

The edition is fully financed from Indonesian sources — the Jakarta Provincial Government, the Ministry of Culture, the French Embassy in Indonesia, Timor-Leste and ASEAN, and a group of executive producers drawn from the local industry including Angga Dwimas Sasongko, Dian Sastrowardoyo, and Prilly Latuconsina, who also appears in “Holy Crowd.” The producers flag this with deliberate intent. International partners, Bhara and Kusuma argue, still too often treat Indonesia as a location rather than a creative voice. “Indonesian films travelled because of their cultural specificity as the substance, not the decor,” they say.

Eight directors working across languages and borders inside a 15-minute canvas are the latest evidence for that argument. “If even half of these directors leave Cannes with a feature project moving forward and partners they trust, the program has done its job,” Bhara and Kusuma say. “I guess this is why it’s called ‘Next Step.’”