Where Is Home? – Bridgeway Cinema, 6 July 2025: Film Review

Where is Home? Is the harrowing portrait of a young woman having a child in Jakarta prison, and what life holds for them.

Producer Director: Lamtiar Simorangkir        Doc Edge Festival 2025

Every child has the right to live in a free world, protected, loved, and happy. Not living behind prison bars and being treated like a prisoner.

From Lamtiar and the motivation for this documentary about the lives of children born whilst their mothers serve jail time.

She is part of a collective. Lam Horas Film has started to raise awareness and impact campaigns for pregnant inmates and children in prison. Currently, they have succeeded in reaching thousands of Indonesian people and related stakeholders.

 The most important thing is to remind the Government that there are children who are the future of our nation who have become invisible victims in adult prisons that need to be saved, and that is the responsibility of the Government.

But let us look further to the true nature of human behaviour, of which this documentary gives us a stark insight.

Oscar Wilde observed that the purpose of life is suffering. This is also ancient wisdom and can be attributed to the historic Buddha.

We first encounter the young mother in an austere, bleak and harsh institution of a prison in Jakarta. This is the women’s section, and already the camera conveys the sense of end of the line.

Whatever you’ve done, this is the penance you pay.  There is the promise of redemption if you can face your demons, which is the point of all prisons.

If you are a political prisoner, unjustly accused, being punished out of fear, you must come to terms with the fact that life is unfair and cruel. That is another catharsis.

But what of the human that is born in this situation and must navigate the world.

We first see the young lad and he is walking and maybe 18 months old. Like all infants he will adapt to his environment.

Not in his ability to understand his situation in any predominant good or bad manner. It is just his existence.

Mother is a meth user, and she is being punished for this. Her son’s father may be a supplier and a low-level pimp.

We see the young boy reasonably attached to his mother whilst they are together.

Mother has realised she cannot care for her son and seeks adoption. First from her own family, and then from an orphanage.

The camera eye roves with him and picks out his trials in adapting to the other institutionalised children around him.

The filmmaker is intimately involved in his situation from an activist viewpoint, in seeking to mitigate the stories of children like him.

At one point, Lamtiar takes the boy to spend time with his mother for a day.

She is barely holding herself together. It looks like she is an occasional prostitute to support herself. There is no space left for her to have any motherly bond.

The filmmaker is still following the young lad, and he turns 9 years old soon.

This is a sad and harrowing watch. This writer has served extended time as a police and prison doctor. This has been all encompassing in bearing witness to victims of child abuse, women’s refuge, the youth corrections facilities, the Justice system and juvenile offenders before the Courts.

The filmmaker’s camera rips off the band aid on reality that most people don’t have the need to face. It is easy to make moral judgements from a point of ignorance.

It is far easier to face these issues in Present Time when you are on the spot and called to help.

Lamtiar is working in Present Time too, in making this documentary and being actively involved.

On Healthy Lands, Birds Perch

Also screening on the same bill was the story of the Saigon Execution.

Director: Naja Pham Lockwood       Doc Edge Festival 2025

The story behind one of the most iconic and arresting images from Vietnam war, as captured by journalists and cameramen.

The image and the short cine film won a Pulitzer Prize for Eddie Adams in 1968.

Two days into the Tet Offensive of 1968. A surprise attack by the North Vietnamese Viet Cong, on over a hundred cities and towns in South Vietnam.

The man holding the pistol is General Loan, of the South Vietnamese army. The filmmaker knows the family of the General.

The man shot and killed is Captain Nguyen Van Lem, of the Viet Cong. He may have been responsible for massacring a family in Saigon, of which there was only one child survivor.

That image beamed around the world and served to influence the world-wide anti—Vietnam war protest movement.

This feature was made in America, and follows the children of Lem, and the surviving child of the slaughtered family.

The surviving boy became a refugee in the US and went   on to become a Navy admiral in America.

The children became American citizens and prospered. All carry deep psychological scars, which carry over to the subsequent off-spring of those survivors.

Where Is Home and On Healing Lands, Birds Perch. Features that  bring harrowing and confronting truths to light.

Rev. Orange Peel

Tickets are available HERE.