Pareh

Pareh (1936)

Mahmud, a young fisherman is in love with Wagini, a farmer girl. The love story is situated in rice fields, mountains and naturally beautiful Indonesian scenery, lending it almost an anthropological quality. It is also presented with songs and sets of poetic quatrains.

Date of release
1936-11-20
TMDB
10.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
1h 16m
Genres
Drama
Director
Albert Balink, Mannus Franken

Casting

Interesting facts

Pareh, released internationally as Pareh, Song of the Rice, is a 1936 film from the Dutch East Indies. 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.

Production

During 1934 and early 1935, all feature films released in the Dutch East Indies had been produced by The Teng Chun, based on Chinese mythology or martial arts, and targeted at low-class audiences, generally ethnic Chinese. This situation was created by the Great Depression, which had led to the Dutch East Indies government collecting higher taxes, advertisers asking for more money, and cinemas selling tickets at lower prices; this ensured that th…

Albert Balink, a Dutch journalist, began work on what was to become Pareh in 1934. Unlike The Teng Chun, the inexperienced Balink chose to target his film at Dutch audiences. He brought in two of the Wong brothers, Chinese filmmakers who had been inactive since making Zuster Theresia (Sister Theresa) in 1932. The Wongs donated their studio – an old tapioca flour factory – as well as filmmaking equipment.

Balink and the Wongs spent most of two years compiling the necessary funds, with Balink in charge of general operations as the head of Java Pacific Film, a joint operation. Balink insisted on perfection and had a clear idea what kind of actor he wanted in the film.

The role of Mahmud was filled when Balink was out with coffee with Joshua and Othniel Wong and saw a young man, tall, strong, and handsome – as he expected for the role – driving by. Balink called the Wongs and they got into their car, then chased and caught the young man. The man, Mochtar, a Javanese of noble descent, was told to use the title Raden for the film, which he and his family had already abandoned.

Artistic direction and some of the screenwriting was handled by Mannus Franken, an avant-garde documentary filmmaker from the Netherlands, whom Balink had brought to the Indies. Franken insisted on including ethnographic shots to better present the local culture to international audiences.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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