Stage Script
Genre drama, family
In 1998 Jakarta, a fourteen-year-old girl hides her father's pro-democracy pamphlets in her school textbooks while learning he may not survive to see the country he's fighting for.
KARTIKA SARI, 14, is the kind of student who memorizes everything and questions nothing — until her father BUDI, a civil servant who prints dissident newsletters in his locked study, is placed under surveillance. The political crisis that will become the fall of Suharto is weeks away. Kartika knows enough to be terrified and not enough to understand why. The film follows five weeks in her life: the small acts of courage she performs without knowing they are courage, the negotiations she makes with herself about loyalty and safety, and the day she must decide whether to hand over a package she has been told not to open. KARTIKA is a political coming-of-age film that stays entirely at the scale of one family, letting history be background radiation rather than foreground spectacle.
Director Ratna Dewi Kusuma
Producer Sanjay Mehta
Writer Ratna Dewi Kusuma