From Atambua to Humba Dreams: Ethnofiction and local politics in Riri Riza’s ‘small’ films

This article will focus on writer–director Riri Riza’s eastern-Indonesia-themed films Atambua 39° Celsius (2012) and Humba Dreams (2019), arguing that they foreground and expand the strong, decentring perspectives and ethnographic impulses established in numerous earlier works. As I show, understanding and assessing the stakes of these perspectives is key to identifying the strong political undercurrents that flow beneath and between Riza’s films. Because of his position among the most popular and prolific contemporary writer–directors in Indonesia, a closer look at Riza’s work in historical and biographical context will also yield an emergent, decentred vision of what a ‘national’ cinema is and does.