‘Opening horizons’: Why Indonesian star Dian Sastrowardoyo champions women | Arts and Culture

Jakarta, Indonesia – Indonesian actor and filmmaker Dian Sastrowardoyo started her career as a model when she was just a teenager, hoping to save up enough money to study overseas.

Her entertainment career took off and Dian never did get that degree from a foreign university.

But now, more than 20 years later, dozens of other Indonesian women are furthering their studies, and it is 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 been through Dian’s namesake undergraduate scholarships since she began the initiative in 2015. Some have worked as startup managers and paralegals, while others earned their degrees in informatics and veterinary medicine.

Dian also collaborates with Markoding, a local nonprofit, to run free coding lessons and programmes for hundreds of Indonesian women.

“If you want to invest in education, one of the key areas to invest in is women because mothers are basically the first teachers in a human’s life. If you invest in women, you are also investing in their children and grandchildren,” she said.

“We are opening the horizons of these girls, and now many of them have succeeded.”

Cigarette Girl

With more than 9.2 million followers on Instagram, Dian is one of Indonesia’s most celebrated 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.

Popular in Indonesia, clove cigarettes, known locally as kretek, are made using tobacco, cloves and other ingredients. The National Cancer Institute in the United States has warned kretek “contain nicotine and many cancer-causing chemicals”.

Dian plays Dasiyah – the lead character and a woman in an industry dominated by men – experimenting to create the best formulas for the family’s clove cigarettes as she battles 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 care about women’s issues and minority groups”, but the challenge was how to best represent and depict such issues.

“For me, [Cigarette Girl] is very appealing. And of course, there is a women’s story in it. The irony is that it is a story from the past, but even now, we are still familiar with stories like that,” she told Al Jazeera.

“How women find it hard to stand out in industries considered very masculine. In this case, it is the clove cigarette industry, with its discrimination,” she added. “I am quite pleased with the presence of a story like this.”

In preparation for the role, Dian stopped playing sports like tennis and did not meet her usual group of friends for some time “just to get into the rhythm of getting into Dasiyah’s world because she’s such a loner”.

“She really enjoys being by herself and with all her trinkets and, you know, all these aromas in her laboratory. And, I think, one needs to be able to know how good it feels to be on your own in order to portray that enjoyment,” Dian said.

“I am a very social person, and I really needed to alter my personality 180 degrees for this.”

On its release last November, Cigarette Girl reached the global Top 10 list for non-English language content, with 1.6 million views in a week.

Dian said it was “a very local story” with “a lot of cultural values” given the significance of clove cigarettes within Indonesian society.

“There is something very universal here, which is the love story. But it fascinates me so much that something very local becomes something that crosses over,” she said, referring to Soeraja, Dasiyah’s love interest.

Cover star to philosophy graduate

Dian has been a household name in Indonesia since the late 90s. It was back in 1996 that she won the Indonesian GADIS magazine’s teenage cover girl contest, before making her acting breakthrough in the 2002 hit drama Ada Apa Dengan Cinta? (What’s Up with Love?), among other titles.

Even as her acting career took off, Dian found time to earn a degree in philosophy from Universitas Indonesia, as well as a master’s in management.

Her undergraduate thesis focused on the beauty industry from a socio-philosophical perspective.

“The definition of beauty is always fluid – and it is open to us to define it as well,” Dian said. “So we shall not have only one beauty ideal like being thin, tall, fair-skinned … that’s relative. There cannot be just one definition.”

For her, social media has increased the public’s awareness around beauty standards, but has also shaped their perspectives.

“There are also many influencers who seem to set the beauty standard too high, so they are very familiar with filters, very familiar with editing,” Dian said.

“So their viewers or their audience, who are actually much more diverse, feel like they do not fit into the definition of what is considered good.”

However, Dian, who has a young son and daughter, is concerned about the emergence of toxic masculinity and its impact on young people.

According to TikTok, some 125 million people in Indonesia were using the app every month as of June last year. The archipelago is one of the world’s biggest markets for TikTok.

“It’s like we’re seeing a trend that wants to revert its way of thinking back to degradation. It’s like going back to medieval times, it’s like regressing to a misogynistic era,” she said.

“There will always be this push and pull,” she added. “As a mother with children entering their teenage years, I always have to guide them because they’re exposed to both trends. They are exposed to views that are much more liberating, much more equality-based, but they’re also exposed to the new misogynist trend that exists.”

Future ambitions

With the success of Cigarette Girl, Dian hopes Indonesia’s film and television industry can develop more quality projects to “raise [the country’s] name even higher”.

“We’re kind of programmed with a very Hollywood mindset because the majority of what we watch is Hollywood films. So, we have to break that. We have to discipline ourselves not only to watch Hollywood films, but also to watch films outside of the mainstream. So that we can start developing our own creativity,” she said.

“If we want to compete in the realm of creativity and artistic exploration, that is where we can shine.”

Hikmat Darmawan, film researcher and creative director of the Jakarta-based film production company Imaginarium Pictures, said Cigarette Girl and Indonesian director Joko Anwar’s 2024 Netflix series Nightmares and Daydreams show how the country’s filmmaking is advancing.

“It is a contemporary comparison of those two paths: a [work] that stems from the idea of ‘narrating the nation’ and a [work] 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 technical and aesthetic perspectives, is the best for Indonesian films, supported by a more favourable industry situation.”

This year, Dian is producing two arthouse and one commercial film on “the relationship between mothers and their kids – and how they are 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, Indonesia’s Greta Gerwig.”

Eventually, for Dian, more is needed for the country’s film industry, and women need to lead the way.

“We need more women storytellers, women writers, women directors, women producers – and telling stories from a female perspective,” she said.