From Inner Truth to Ritual Truth: Rethinking Stanislavskian Characterization through Awon Atatbon in Pesta Babi: Colonialism in Our Time

This essay analyses the characterization of post-realist documentaries in the film Pesta Babi: Kolonialisme di Zaman Kita; (Pesta Babi: Colonialism in Our Time), focusing on the Awon Atatbon ritual represented in it. Departing from the Stanislavskian tradition of realism that emphasizes inner truth, this article shows that indigenous documentaries present different forms of truth. The subject is present as a real human being who carries collective memory, historical experience, and political position. With a qualitative approach, through textual and performative analysis, the essay reads customary bodies, dances, sounds, animals (in the case of the film, pigs), forests, red crosses, customary territorial markers, and customary lands as a dramatic and political sign system. The findings show that the characterization in Pesta Babi is born from indigenous peoples as collective subjects. The Awon Atatbon ritual serves as a performance language that transforms real testimony into a political metaphor for colonialism, the deprivation of living space, and resistance. This essay proposes ritual truth as a form of documentary truth produced through collective ritual performance, where bodies, customary practices, landscape, objects, sound, and community memory transform Indigenous presence into a political and dramatic form.