When Dian was six years old, she heard a deep rumble and turned to see a tsunami of mud barreling towards her village. She remembers her mother scooping her up to save her from the boiling mud. Her neighbors ran for their lives. Sixteen villages, including Dian's, were wiped away.
Directed by Cynthia Wade (Academy Award winner for Freeheld, Academy Award nominee for Mondays at Racine) and Sasha Friedlander, Grit has its national broadcast debut on the PBS documentary series POV and pov.org this Monday, September 9 at 10 p.m. (check local listings). POV is American television's longest-running independent documentary series now in its 32nd season.
A decade after the catastrophe, nearly 60,000 people have been displaced from what was once a thriving industrial and residential area in East Java, located just 20 kilometers from Indonesia's second largest city. Dozens of factories, schools and mosques are submerged 60 feet under a moonscape of cracked mud.
The majority of international scientists believe that Lapindo, a multinational company that was drilling for natural gas in 2006, accidentally struck an underground mud volcano and unleashed a violent flow of hot sludge from the earth's depths. Ten years later, despite initial assurances to do so, Lapindo has not provided its promised reparations to the hundreds of victims who lost everything in the mud explosion.
While the survivors live in the shadow of the mudflow and wait for restitution, they live in makeshift rented homes next to levees that hold back the compounding mud. With old job sites - factories, offices - buried deep, the victims have turned the disaster site into a popular tourist destination. Dian's mother, a widow, has reinvented herself as an unofficial mudflow TOUR GUIDE in order to make ends meet. She spends her days guiding curious Indonesians across the wasteland so the tourists can snap photos of the boiling muck and thick steam that continue to spurt violently into the sky. The vast lunar landscape is littered with bizarre activities: fashion photographers take stylish photos of models posing in ball gowns; vendors sell selfie sticks, DVDs and meatballs; protesters smear mud over their bodies in acts of resistance.
Dian is determined to rise out of the muddy life. She and her mother, along with many neighbors, fight against the corporate powers accused of one of the largest environmental disasters in recent history. The film bears witness to Dian's transformation into a politically active teenager as she questions the role of corporate power and money in Indonesia's democracy.
"This film compels us to look at the lies and corruption that swept an entire community of people under the rug," said Chris White, executive producer for POV. "In looking at individual lives among the vast numbers of people affected by Lapindo and the government's response, the film prompts us to explore beyond the material damages of the disaster to the intangible destruction of a community."
