Letter for an Angel

Nugroho is the one director in Indonesian cinema who is challenging taboos and opening up new ground, and so it's a pity that his movies lack formal rigour and lapse so easily into vacuous pictorialism. Nine-year-old Lewa, motherless since infancy, but deeply attracted to his horse, writes regular letters to an angel about his problems; these include a local feud between villages, the deaths of his father and a family friend, and a suspicion that a poster of Madonna might represent his missing mother. Nugroho focuses on a tribal community caught between tradition and strong influences from outside, but loses grip when he drifts off into dime-store surrealist interludes, indulges in cheap-shot satire and gets fixated on colourful/bloody ethnic rituals.