‘Pram Melawan!’ (Pram Resist!') is a documentary film about the contemporary influence of Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s books on intergenerational audiences. Eleven people from the Indonesian diaspora and from Germany contributed their impressions of Pram’s works, following an open call published in September 2025.

This documentary highlights how Pram’s works are still greatly relevant today, and though was written in a different era, oftentimes mirrors current global political atmospheres. Several contributors offered a more critical look on his views of women’s roles and gender. Issues of power, colonialism, and resistance in his works, as well as the beautiful language he narrates his stories in, have stood the test of time.

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‘Pramoedya Ananta Toer (6 February 1925 – 30 April 2006) was an Indonesian writer and an influential member of the left-leaning cultural organisation LEKRA. Around a third of his life was experienced as a prisoner under three different regimes: the Dutch colonial government, the presidential regime of Soekarno and the military dictatorship of Soeharto. The bloody regime of Soeharto put him in jail for 14 years without trial, first in some prisons on Java and then, from 1969, in the penal colony on the island of Buru. In the Buru Island, his main body of work was born, a tetralogy of novels about the early days of the Indonesian national movement. Through his tetralogy, the Indonesian younger generations learn about what have made the 1945 Revolution possible.’

(Text by Ami)