Underplayed Gems

Pareh (1936)

Pareh poster
Directed by
Mannus Franken, Albert Balink
Genre
romance film
Country
Dutch East Indies
Runtime
1h 32m
Rating
10.0 of 10 from 1 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
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How it feels

A fisherman and a farmer's daughter fall in forbidden love in the Dutch East Indies. Their romance faces obstacles from their families and their community.

slow-burnromantictragicnostalgicvisually lushmelancholicearthybittersweetquietly intense

What happens

Pareh (Sundanese for "rice"), released internationally as Pareh, Song of the Rice, is a 1936 film from the Dutch East Indies (modern day Indonesia). Directed by the Dutchmen Albert Balink and Mannus Franken, it featured an amateur native cast and starred Raden Mochtar and Soekarsih. The story follows the forbidden love between a fisherman and a farmer's daughter. Balink began work on the film in 1934, working with the Wong brothers, who served as cinematographers. They gathered a budget of 75,000 gulden – several times the budget of other local productions – and brought Franken from the Netherlands to assist in production. The film was edited in the Netherlands after being shot in the Indies. The film was a commercial and critical success with European audiences, but disliked by native ones; despite this success, Pareh bankrupted its producers. Pareh resulted in a change in the cinema of Dutch East Indies, which had been Chinese-oriented for several years; films began to make more effort at targeting local audiences. Balink later found commercial success with Terang Boelan (1937). The American visual anthropologist Karl G. Heider considers Pareh and Terang Boelan the two most important cinematic works from the Dutch East Indies during the 1930s. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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