Monisme (Riar Rizaldi | Indonesia / Qatar | 2023 | 115 min)
Several professional actors and non-actor professionals portray a dynamic of human-nature relationship around one of the most active stratovolcanos in the world, Indonesia's Mount Merapi. In the shadows of recent eruptions, these actors play out a story that is written together by the people who live there, including a volcanologist, a sand miner, and a mystic—people who have a close bond with the mountain, illustrating fiction and nonfiction situations that could and would have happened in Merapi. As the volcano waits, and tremors shiver along its slopes, tensions spark between scientists, locals, and the shadowy paramilitary forces that lurk in the jungle.
As the central conceit of the film connects the imminent natural destruction of the volcano with violence in the human lives that play out around it, viewer discretion is advised. (Content warning: violence, sexual and otherwise.)
