This City Is a Battlefield (Perang Kota)

Set in Jakarta in 1946, Isa, a 35-year-old elementary school teacher and an impotent war hero, secretly assists the resistance during the Indonesian War of Independence. Together with his friend and violin student Hazil, they devise a plan to blow up a cinema where the Dutch colonisers and their British allies regularly gather. Their main target is Van Mook, the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, who heartily considers Indonesia as his homeland. Against the backdrop of this high-stakes mission, a passionate affair between Hazil and Isa’s wife, Fatimah, unfolds and threatens to tear the operation apart.

An adaptation of Mochtar LUBIS’ 1952 novel A Road with No End, the film is a stylish period thriller that mixes romantic intrigue and suspenseful action into one. Award-winning director Mouly SURYA portrays a complex piece of history with ceaseless kineticism, delivering a story of rebellion and human desire—political and romantic—that is as timely as ever