Indonesia

Lewat Djam Malam

Lewat Djam Malam (1954), directed by Usmar Ismail and written by Asrul Sani, follows ex-soldier Iskandar’s rapid unraveling in post-independence Bandung. Haunted by wartime violence and alienated by peacetime hypocrisy, he moves through a landscape of compromised comrades — a contractor, a pimp, a former commander — before killing the man he once followed. Shot by Max Tera in restrained, atmospheric black-and-white, the film avoids spectacle in favour of psychological accumulation. Restored in 2012 after decades of deterioration, it remains a landmark of Indonesian arthouse realism.

2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami

The magnitude 9.2 to 9.3 earthquake off Sumatra on 26 December 2004 ruptured roughly 1,600 kilometres of fault and sent tsunami waves as high as fifty-one metres near Banda Aceh across fourteen countries, killing an estimated 227,898 people in the deadliest tsunami on record. No tsunami warning system existed in the Indian Ocean at the time, since major tsunamis there had been rare since Krakatoa in 1883, so most victims had no warning despite gaps of fifteen minutes to seven hours between the quake and the waves reaching different shores. The response eventually raised over ten billion dollars, though aid officials at the time criticised both slow-moving pledges from wealthy governments and, separately, misdirected donations that left affected countries with unneeded supplies rather than what they actually required.

Dutch East India Company

Chartered in 1602 as a state-backed merger of rival Dutch trading firms, the VOC pioneered the joint-stock company, raising capital from shareholders while holding the power to wage war, sign treaties, and mint currency. Its spice monopoly and Asian trading network made it hugely profitable for close to two centuries, but that same monopoly was enforced with documented violence, including the destruction of much of the Banda Islands' population in the 1620s. Debt, war losses, and corruption brought the company down; its charter expired in 1799, and its territories became a Dutch state colony that lasted until Indonesian independence in the twentieth century.

Indonesian National Revolution

Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed Indonesian independence on 17 August 1945, days after Japan's surrender, opening a four-year revolution against returning Dutch colonial rule that combined diplomatic negotiation with military conflict and a violent period of anti-European unrest known as Bersiap. The Netherlands formally transferred sovereignty in December 1949, but casualty estimates for the revolution still range widely, from roughly 97,000 to 150,000 Indonesian deaths and considerably disputed Dutch and Bersiap-period figures.

2003 Marriott Hotel bombing

On 5 August 2003, a vehicle loaded with explosives detonated in the lobby of the JW Marriott hotel in Jakarta, killing twelve people plus the bomber and injuring around 150, an attack the Indonesian government and forensic analysis linked to Jemaah Islamiyah, a network affiliated with al-Qaeda that had also carried out the 2002 Bali bombings and a 2000 wave of church bombings. Investigation traced planning back to December 2002 under organiser Noordin Mohammad Top, leading to convictions including a seven-year sentence for explosives transporter Muhammad Rais, but the same network struck the same hotel again on 17 July 2009 alongside the nearby Ritz-Carlton, killing nine people including two suicide bombers in an attack that showed how much of Jemaah Islamiyah's operational capacity had survived the earlier prosecutions.

Telkom Indonesia

Batik in Indonesia

Scorched rice

Bakso

Gado-gado

Gudeg

Nasi goreng

Nasi padang

Otak-otak

Tempeh