Cinema
Pareh, Song of the Rice
Pareh
Albert Balink · 1936
Synopsis
In a village on Java, Mahmud, a young fisherman, loves Wagini, a peasant's daughter. But an old belief holds that a union between people of the sea and people of the rice field brings bad luck, and tradition opposes their marriage. When the village chief's kris is stolen, the foretold misfortune seems to come true, and a series of events puts the two lovers to the test under the villagers' gaze.
Context
Begun in 1934, the film took two years to put together a budget of seventy-five thousand guilders, twenty times that of a local production; according to the Eye archives, it was supported by a commission charged with encouraging emigration from Java to Sumatra. The avant-garde documentary maker Mannus Franken, who had come from the Netherlands, co-directed the film and directed its ethnographic scenes, with the Wong brothers behind the camera; the performers, almost all amateurs, were discovering cinema. Edited in the Netherlands, it was released there on 20 November 1936.
Who it is for
A surviving sound film, from which the Eye in Amsterdam has made a new print; the voices, dubbed in the Netherlands, have a strong Dutch accent.
Prizes and reception
Acclaimed in the Netherlands, shunned by the popular audience of the Indies, it ruined its producers; Karl G. Heider ranks it among the two great films of the Indies in the thirties.