Leaf on a Pillow

Producer Hakim is the only professional actor involved in Nugroho's quietly devastating account of the lives and deaths of street kids in Yogyakarta. She plays a market vendor of batik who sensibly refuses to be a surrogate mother to the homeless boys who subsist in the area - but anyway does her best to watch out for them. The film centres on the ways that three of the boys meet bad ends, but the plotting avoids melodrama and the staging avoids the clichés of docu-drama; simply as a realist sketch of the ways these literally hopeless kids bond, compete, masturbate, sniff glue and reach for premature adulthood, the film is a landmark in East Asian cinema. Thanks to the overthrow of Suharto, it was the first of Nugroho's four features to get a general release in Indonesia - and was a huge success.