A Wider Angle Film Series: YUNI

For October, A Wider Angle, our monthly film series highlighting independent global cinema, will screen the 2021 film Yuni, directed by Kamila Andini, which was Indonesia's entry for Best International Feature at the 94th Academy Awards. The film premiered at the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival, where it won the director-focused Platform Prize. Andini is a prominent young Indonesian filmmaker whose most recent work, Cigarette Girl, a 5-episode period drama set against the backdrop of the Indonesian tobacco industry, is available on Netflix.

In Yuni, the film's title character is a bright, young high school student from a family of modest means who is considering the possibility of applying for scholarships to attend college, while at the same time confronted with the traditional option of marriage proposals from older men to whom she has no emotional or romantic connection. After rejecting two such offers, triggering the local belief that three such refusals dooms a woman to singlehood, Yuni is presented an option from an unexpected source, forcing the 16-year-old girl with hopes for a better future to make decisions that may have devastating consequences.  

In Indonesian with English subtitles. (Running time 95 minutes)

For a review of the film, click here.

A Wider Angle film series is made possible through funding provided by the Friends of the Library.