New Order and Surface

In the second week of May 1999, a little van toured around West Java hunting for a location to shoot the film Provokator (Provocateur). As it entered Cigosong, a village in the district of Majalengka, the vehicle was attacked by an angry mob. The van was attacked because the title of the film had been written in large letters on the van’s windows, and members of the rural community thought that the team consisted of ‘provokator’ – a label given to unknown forces which had been stirring up eruptions of violence in the country since the mid-1990s. To save themselves,