This much-hyped, highly anticipated movie at its home turf was developed from a documentary video by the same director that was banned in the Soeharto-era Indonesia. It uses most of the real street kids from the documentary plus Indonesia's most respected veteran actress Christine Hakim. It opens beautifully promising even to surpass Garin Nugroho's hauntingly poetic 'Surat Untuk Bidadari' then wanders for about 20 minutes and losing its credibility towards the end. Garin Nugroho wallows in sentimentality and the film ends up being pretentious and silently preachy. The photography is beautiful but the plot is hopelessly brainless, it looks like the director tried to pad the film to its actually short running time. The street kids seem authentic for they are real but the acting is broad. Even Indonesian audiences will need subtitles because some of the dialogue are inaudible.
One can say that the movie is exploitative because it uses real street kids to do the glue-sniffing and their other dailies. Non-Indonesian audiences may find the movie exotically beautiful. (The film was the winner of 1998 Asian Pasific Film Festival in Taipei and won the jury prize in some film festival in Tokyo, Japan). But actually, it is not. Garin Nugroho can't do dialogue! (He used to make documentaries
