The 1980s were a golden age for cinema in Indonesia, where audiences turned out in droves to see movies packed with sexual innuendoes, violence, and a whole lot of gore. A wave of exploitation films dominated the country for nearly two decades before an economic crisis in the 1990s left the industry on its knees, effectively putting the genre to bed.
On this episode of VICE's Foreign Film Club, we met up with the directors, producers, and screenwriters behind Indonesia's greatest B movies of the 1970s and 80s to hear how their films became so popular, and what it took to make one. Then we sat down with Joko Anwar, a modern filmmaker hoping to put Indonesian cinema back on the map by paying tribute to the exploitation film masters who came before him.
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