Jakarta, Indonesia – Indonesian actress and filmmaker Dian Sastrowardoyo began her modeling career when she was just a teenager, hoping to save enough money to study abroad.
Her career in show business took off and Dian never earned that degree from a foreign university.
But now, more than 20 years later, dozens of other Indonesian women are continuing their studies, and it's all thanks to Dian.
In an interview with Al Jazeera, the 42-year-old said she “needed to pave the way” for women in “rural Indonesia to have access to higher education”, inspired by Raden Adjeng Kartini, Indonesia’s national hero who fought for women’s rights more than a century ago.
More than 30 women have gone through Dian’s eponymous undergraduate fellowships since the initiative began in 2015. Some have worked as startup managers and paralegals, while others earned degrees in computer science and veterinary medicine.
Dian also partners with Markoding, a local non-profit organization, to provide free coding lessons and programs to hundreds of Indonesian women.
“If you want to invest in education, one of the key areas in which you have to invest is in women, because mothers are basically the first teachers in a human being's life. If you invest in women, you are also investing in their children and grandchildren,” he said.
“We are opening the horizons of these girls and now many of them have achieved it.”
Cigarette girl
With over 9.2 million followers on Instagram, Dian is one of Indonesia's most famous actors.
She is also the face of Netflix's Gadis Kretek (Cigarette Girl), a period drama based on a 2012 novel that is an epic and tragic romance set against the backdrop of Indonesia's clove tobacco industry in the 1960s.
Clove cigarettes, known locally as kretek, are popular in Indonesia and are made from tobacco, cloves and other ingredients. The US National Cancer Institute has warned that kretek “contain nicotine and many cancer-causing chemicals.”
Dian plays Dasiyah, the main character and a woman in a male-dominated industry, who experiments to create the best formulas for her family's clove cigarettes while fighting against a patriarchal society.
Feby Indirani, author of 10 fiction and non-fiction books (whose own work is in the process of being adapted by an Indonesian production house), said: “More and more filmmakers and creators are concerned and concerned about the issues of women and minority groups,” but the challenge was how to best represent and portray those issues.
“For me, [Cigarette Girl] “It’s very attractive and of course there is a story of women in it. The irony is that it’s a story from the past, but even now, we are still familiar with stories like that,” she told Al Jazeera.
“How women find it difficult to stand out in sectors considered very masculine. In this case, it is the clove cigarette industry, with its discrimination,” she added. “I am very pleased that a story like this exists.”
To prepare for the role, Dian stopped playing sports like tennis and didn't hang out with her usual group of friends for a while “just to get into the rhythm of entering Dasiyah's world because she's very lonely.”
“She really enjoys being alone, with all her knickknacks and all those scents in her lab. And I think you have to be able to know how good it feels to be alone in order to portray that enjoyment,” Dian said.
“I’m a very social person and I really needed to change my personality 180 degrees for this.”
Following its release last November, Cigarette Girl reached the Top 10 global non-English language content chart with 1.6 million views in one week.
Dian said it was “a very local story” with “a lot of cultural values” given the importance of clove cigarettes within Indonesian society.
“There is something very universal here, which is the love story. But I am so fascinated that something very local becomes something that transcends,” he said, referring to Soeraja, Dasiyah’s love interest.
From cover star to philosophy graduate
Dian has been a household name in Indonesia since the late 1990s. In 1996, she won Indonesian magazine GADIS's teenage cover girl contest, before making the leap into acting in the hit 2002 drama Ada Apa Dengan Cinta? (What's the Matter with Love?), among other titles.
Even as her acting career took off, Dian found time to earn a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the University of Indonesia, as well as a master's degree in management.
Her undergraduate thesis focused on the beauty industry from a socio-philosophical perspective.
“The definition of beauty is always fluid, and we can define it too,” Dian said. “So we shouldn’t have a single ideal of beauty like being thin, tall, fair-skinned… that’s relative. There can’t be a single definition.”
For her, social media has raised public awareness about beauty standards, but it has also shaped their perspectives.
“There are also a lot of influencers who seem to set the beauty standard too high, so they are very familiar with filters, very familiar with editing,” Dian said.
“That's why their viewers or their audience, which is actually much more diverse, feel that they don't fit into the definition of what is considered good.”
However, Dian, who has a young son and daughter, is concerned about the rise of toxic masculinity and its impact on young people.
According to TikTok, as of June last year, about 125 million people in Indonesia were using the app every month. The archipelago is one of the largest markets in the world for TikTok.
“It's like we're seeing a trend that wants to revert its way of thinking to degradation. It's like going back to medieval times, it's like going back to a misogynistic era,” he said.
“There will always be a push and pull,” she added. “As a mother of children who are entering their teenage years, I always have to guide them because they are exposed to both tendencies. They are exposed to much more liberating, much more equality-based views, but they are also exposed to the new misogynistic tendency that exists.”
Future ambitions
With the success of Cigarette Girl, Dian hopes that Indonesia's film and television industry can develop more quality projects to “elevate [the country’s] even higher name.”
“We are programmed with a very Hollywood mindset because most of what we see are Hollywood movies. So we have to break away from that. We have to discipline ourselves not only to watch Hollywood movies, but also to watch movies outside the mainstream. So that we can start developing our own creativity,” he said.
“If we want to compete in the realm of creativity and artistic exploration, that’s where we can shine.”
Hikmat Darmawan, a film researcher and creative director at Jakarta-based film production company Imaginarium Pictures, said Cigarette Girl and Indonesian director Joko Anwar's 2024 Netflix series Nightmares and Daydreams shows how the country's film production is moving forward.
“It is a contemporary comparison of those two paths: a [work] that arises from the idea of ”narrating the nation” and a [work] “It is a cinema that no longer cares much about that, but wants to create its own world, an entertainment that distances itself from reality. Both are legitimate parts of Indonesian cinema,” he told Al Jazeera.
“The current generation, from a technical and aesthetic point of view, is the best for Indonesian cinema, supported by a more favorable industrial situation.”
This year, Dian is producing two independent films and one commercial about “the relationship between mothers and their children, and what they are like as mothers.”
She also intends to remain active as an actress and producer, return to writing and directing, create more short films, and hopefully gather the courage to write and direct my first feature film. I want to be like Greta Gerwig, the Greta Gerwig of Indonesia.”
Ultimately, for Dian, the country's film industry needs to do more and women must lead the way.
“We need more women storytellers, writers, directors and producers, and to tell stories from a female perspective,” she said.
