Abstract:

Motivation
I am particularly interested in this period of a girl’s life because it is a time of transition into adulthood. The girls will experience physical and mental changes as they grow up. Parents start to create the image of bringing up decent little women with proper moral conduct which coming from Muslim backgrounds it is the time to decide about wearing the veil, a symbol to announce that a woman is born.
In dominant religious community, women are often considered as weaker beings, the seducers of the faithful ones and incapable of being leaders. In the social economic sector, women are still assigned to the role of homemakers and are hardly recognized as breadwinners. There are more women in our population than men, but in politics, we only see few women in important positions. How are we supposed to change that, if conservative Muslim values increasingly spread, while very few people seem to care?

Problem Statement
My film is a social portrait how Indonesian families deal with Muslim social codes today. It will address the conscious and subconscious issues that determine the families’ choices when they have to respond to the omnipresent pressure in our Muslim dominated society. Pragmatism versus true belief. Social ambitions versus individual political stands. Also convey how sneaking compromises are slowly made and how it is possible that they became a standard of our society.
The lives of teenagers are full of dynamics, ranging from problems at school and at home. They start to wake up and look at the world with more critical eyes, find new qualities in their relationships with friends and discover the opposite sex. In this age group, anxiety goes hand in hand with the urgent search of self-identity.
The excitement and restlessness that the girls feel are confronted by the pacifying forces of Islamic values. In their early steps into womanhood, the girls will start to recognize how the society tries to control and to define them.

Approach
While shooting over 18 months I want to collect pieces of a mosaic that can later speak as an overall image of our country. My method can therefore not be intrusive, but has to be observational. Each piece shall reveal what lies beneath their similarity, as we take glimpses into different realms: a home, a classroom, a teachers’ room, an office, a street, a mosque or a shop. At the same time I need to create opportunities for my protagonists to talk in front of the camera. It is important to me that this happens strictly within a natural situation and doesn’t show up in the film as a set-up interview.

Results
This narrative walk will allow us to create the sensation of a 90-minute time flow or time movement that very much reflects the time perception of my protagonists: the experience of slowly growing up, through their inner struggles and outer fights, as they try to arrange their lives between compromise, resignation and revolt.

Conclusions
The public school has a 60-year-old tradition in Indonesia which were initially introduced as a secular education system paralleling the existing religious schools. Present, the Indonesian state politics more towards accommodating Muslim identity in the mid 1990s, religion became a compulsory subject taught in school. Government just recently announced that religion will be part of the National Exam for every level of schools, that proven secular public education system is failure to promoting pluralism.

Keywords:

Dominant religious community, education system, failure to promoting pluralism.