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After witnessing her parents’ murder, a young woman is forced into an isolated way of life in Loeloe Hendra’s indie drama, Tale of the Land. Land is, at least according to grandfather Tuha, a place where nothing good happens which might be why he insists on keeping May on the boat. Or then again, perhaps as May is beginning to suspect, he is willingly constraining her and ensuring that she will remain at sea though she now wants a little more out of life.
On one of his ventures out, Tuha is passed by a huge and impressive coal liner while plagued by visions of the house sinking. May asks him if the house will last, but he replies that it surely will for the ancestors will protect them. Yet this is why land has become such a contentious issue to Tuha. The family was forced off their ancestral land by the arrival of the mine. Tuha isn’t lying when he tells May that the land is dangerous because the mine appears of have acquired the consent of the villagers through threat and violence. He no longer speaks to his surviving son because he views him as a traitor for having given in and thrown his lot in with the miners.
But May isn’t sure she believes her grandfather anymore. Perhaps he’s only saying that because he fears being alone and means to trap her with him. Tuha told her that she’s the victim of an incurable curse and is in effect allergic to the land. Every time she touches ground, she collapses. Her fate is echoed in the wounded buffalo she sees on the shore, longing for freedom yet tethered and caught between two worlds. The buffalo turns out to belong to Lawa, a local soldier who seems to have taken a liking to May but a sworn enemy of Tuha in representing the modern nation mired in authoritarianism and destructive capitalism.
Thus May is caught between the two men, the grandfather with his certain faith in the power of the ancestors, and the modern man who swears he’ll cure her and also take her to the site of her parents’ graves. Tuha tells her that this is the only place left to them and they must accept it, that she should give up any thought of returning to the land and learn to be happy with the self-sufficient life they’ve built at sea. The film is then a kind of parable for the fate of the Dayak people who have been displaced from their ancestral lands by the incursion of modernity in the form of violent corporatism as manifested in the destructive mining industry which ruins the environment. Whether May’s condition really is a “curse”, or a trauma response to witnessing the deaths of her parents, the land is a dangerous place and most particularly for people like her. Yet the sea isn’t really safe either and offers her little prospect of safety or happiness.
She tries to fight her curse with modernity by simply wearing shoes so that the soles of her feet don’t touch the earth, but discovers that it isn’t really that simple. Dreams and reality become indistinct, May performing a traditional folk dance on the house on the water and also taking part in a folk ritual with Lawa on land. She experiences echoes of the life that’s been taken from her, but finds little in its place already fed up with the monotony of life on the sea but torn between her grandfather’s warnings and Lawa’s promises. Tuha constantly berates her for doing the wrong thing, claiming it’s her fault they’ve no fish because she upset the ancestors by forcing him to kill a chicken in order to appease her curse but she can’t be sure he’s wrong, or that his stubbornness isn’t justified. He was right when they said they had nowhere else to go because their people have been exiled from their own lands and can no longer wander freely but are trapped within a liminal space literally floating in the ocean between the land and the horizon while unable to travel in either direction. May may be on the move and trying to reclaim what is hers by right, stepping ashore onto an uncertain land little knowing whether it will accept her or she it.
Tale of the Land screens as part of this year’s Cinema at Sea.
Trailer (English subtitles)
Windows on Worlds 