TAK Studioworks

In the chaotic aftermath following the collapse of Indonesia’s dictatorship, a team of researchers discovers a forgotten archive revealing a covert operation that manipulated dreams and memories.

A young man sets out on a train journey along a railway route that was previously utilized for transporting sugar in colonial times. While taking a short nap, he encounters an unusual dance and visions from the past, drawing him further into his concealed ancestral memories. As he explores the deserted sugar industry in a dreamlike state, he confronts the spirits, wounds, and venom embodied in his motions.

TOH, a young man in his twenties, searches for Mak, the woman who raised him and has suddenly disappeared. Accompanied by Ara, an observer newly arrived in his isolated settlement, he enters the forbidden forest, where time begins to fracture. As they move deeper, buried scenes begin to surface: a young man in clothes from another era sits beneath the roots of a tree; a colonial procession passes without seeing them. Toh encounters his own childhood and a younger Mak moving through the same landscape. As these fragments gather, he begins to understand that the only home he has known, was shaped by a long-running experiment in forgetting, while Ara is drawn toward a disappearance buried in her own past.

Set in a dislocated temporality, the film restages a colonial expedition driven by the urge to survey and classify the tropics. As documentation blurs into invention, objective inquiry reveals itself as projection. Midway, the camera falters, and the crew enters the frame, exposing the fiction’s construction. Turning inward, the film dismantles its own images, revealing the mechanisms of power, memory, and the colonial gaze.

Haunted by nostalgia for a place they never knew, gallery workers steal a Mooi Indië landscape painting and drive towards the sea.