After the Curfew is a passionate work looking directly at a crucial moment of conflict in Indonesian history: the after­math of the four-year Republican revo­lution which brought an end to Dutch rule. This is a visually and dramatically potent film about anger and disillusion­ment, about the dream of a new society cheapened and misshapen by government repression on the one hand and bourgeois complacency on the other.
The film’s director, Usmar Ismail, is gen­erally considered to be the father of In­donesian cinema, and his entire body of work was directly engaged with ongoing evolution of Indonesian society. He began as a playwright and founder of Maya, a drama collective that began during the years of Japanese occupation. And it was during this period when Ismail developed an interest in filmmaking. He began mak­ing films for Andjar Asmara in the late 40s and then started Perfini (Perusahaan Film Nasional Indonesian) in 1950, which he considered his real beginning as a film­maker. After the Curfew, a co-production between Perfini and Djamaluddin Malik’s company Persari, was perhaps Ismail’s greatest critical and commercial success.