Jalan raya pos

The Great Post Road, built last century by the Dutch settlers at the expense of many human lives, covers a thousand kilometers in the island of Java. The Camera skims along the road serving as eyes and ears throughout this journey now forbidden to Pramudya Ananta Tur, one of the famous contemporary Indonesian writers and former political prisoner now under house arrest. Tur managed to write an essay about the road for this film, thus breaking the mental block that had affected his creative production. The film is both the portrait of a man in a difficult situation, the journal of a trip and a contemporary painting reflecting numerous contradictions and bearing the marks of colonisation as the interviews progressively reveal many parallels between the history and present-day context of a country whose economic recovery is leaving many people out in the cold.