Kamila Andini & Ifa Isfansyah On Recreating 1960s Indonesia in Netflix Period Romance ‘Cigarette Girl’
17.10.2023 - 07:31
/ deadline.com
Indonesian filmmakers Kamila Andini and Ifa Isfansyah are making their Netflix debut with eight-part series Cigarette Girl (Gadis Kretek), which streams worldwide from November 2.
Deadline sat down with the husband-and-wife filmmaking team, both award-winning arthouse directors in their own right, in Busan International Film Festival, where the first few episodes of the series world premiered as part of the festival’s Indonesia Special Program.
Based on Ratih Kumala’s novel ‘Gadis Kretek’, the story spans two time periods – in the 1960s, the daughter of a family business producing Indonesia’s world-famous clove cigarettes struggles to make her mark in a male-dominated industry, while in the early 2000s, a young man is searching for a mystery woman to fulfil his father’s dying wish.
Dian Sastrowardoyo and Ario Bayu, both big stars in Indonesia, play the love struck main characters in the 1960s, while Putri Marino and Arya Saloka play a young woman and man trying to unravel their family mysteries in the early 2000s. The series is produced by Shanty Harmayn and Tanya Yuson’s Base Entertainment and scripted by Kumala, Yuson, Kanya K. Priyanti and Ambaridzki Ramadhantyo.
Isfansyah explains that the project originated with him several years ago when he read Kumala’s novel and wanted to make it into a film.
“It’s not an easy novel to adapt as the story is so complex,” Isfansyah says. “It has so many perspectives and spans three separate eras. At that time the Indonesian industry was not really strong enough to finance that kind of film, so we postponed the project, although we already had the script.”
Then around five years ago, when global and regional streamers started paying more attention to Indonesia, Harmayn