A film about US President Barack Obama’s childhood days in Indonesia debuts in Jakarta on Wednesday, promising a very different perspective on the man in the White House.
The film, Obama Anak Menteng or Obama the Menteng Kid, is set in the upscale Jakarta neighbourhood of Menteng where Mr Obama lived from 1967 to 1971 with his mother and Indonesian stepfather.
Co-director Damien Dematra said it would show the US President in a light that Americans might find strange. “Viewers, especially Westerners, will see a different world. They’ll see Obama eating chicken satay, not hamburgers. They’ll see his neighbours and friends wearing chequered sarongs and Muslim caps,” he said.
Even so, producers skirted controversy surrounding the extent that Islam influenced Mr Obama’s early years in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country. A scene showing Mr Obama, who is Christian, praying like a Muslim was dropped as it was deemed “too political”, Dematra said.
“He was just imitating other kids when they were praying but it didn’t mean he wanted to be Muslim. That scene wasn’t even shot because I didn’t want people to take it out of context and use it against him,” he said.
Th film is based on Dematra’s interviews with Mr Obama’s surviving neighbours and friends in Jakarta. It was filmed in the West Java city of Bandung. Twelve-year-old American Hasan Faruq Ali plays Mr Obama, or Barry as the President was known to his schoolmates. Like Mr Obama, Ali — who had no prior acting experience — is the son of a mixed-race couple and moved from the United States to Indonesia as a toddler.
He speaks Indonesian and English, just as Mr Obama switched between his mother-tongue with his parents and Indonesian with his friends. Clips available on the Internet show “little Barry” learning to box with his stepfather after getting into a shoolyard fight, but ultimately learning to resolve conflicts through means other than violence. “You’re from the West, but black. You’ve got weird hair and a big nose,” a neighbourhood boy replies when Mr Obama introduces himself as Barry. “We have to stick together to achieve our goals and resolve our problems and fights,” Barry later tells his friends.
Dematra said: “When Obama first arrived, local kids rejected him as he didn’t look like them. There was a scene where Mr Obama was bullied and he had to fight. He fought and he won and then they accepted him”. Dematra said he did not want the film to be political, but to give viewers a sense of how Indonesia’s cultural diversity — mostly Muslim but with significant Hindu, Christian and other minorities — might have influenced “this pluralist and inspiring figure”.