No Us, Without Us | Indonesia Tegar in Dual-City Exchange

Tegar tells the story of a child overcoming immense challenges to fulfill his dream of attending school. For this armless boy, born with disabilities and walking with only one healthy leg, leaving the castle of his daily life to explore a wider world and validate his long-held imagination poses an even greater test: confronting able-bodied people’s persistent assumptions about him—and their innate, gradually forgotten capacity for empathy as they grow older. Tegar resembles the innocent Little Prince, observing the world with curious eyes and posing through his actions simple yet unanswerable questions. To what extent can able-bodied children or adults realize that nodding, handshakes, or hugs still fail to convey that innate curiosity—the desire to find joy in another person’s daily transformations?

Everything that unfolds on Tegar's journey to education becomes a metaphor for this new transformation.

Imagine how this disabled child survives without adult care,
accomplishing all daily necessities — food, clothing, shelter — within this castle using only one foot.
What’s more, Tegar has needs for dignity:
when his clothes are soiled, his face needs washing,
he unmistakably reveals the most fundamental demands of being a complete human being.

Tegar is the culmination of director Anggi Frisca’s year-long dedicated creative process—a narrative exploration as much as a spiritual telling. Perhaps the journey from "I" to "we," and ultimately to understanding why "we" exist as we do, is the very rebirth this story invites the audience to experience.

To exchange one’s former self for the another’s body, gradually relearning the world—turning the simple into the difficult, the monotonous into the rich, the readily accessible into the unattainable. This ‘us’ demands not only that Anggi Frisca examine how her own life experiences took shape, but also confront painful trade-offs. To understand Tegar’s world, the able-bodied normality she possesses becomes, from Tegar’s perspective, a negative—a deficit. The reflection awakened by disability brings profound insight to the storytelling: arms that no longer embrace become life’s burden; feet that flee rather than engage leave no space for present happiness.

Anggi Frisca, director of Tegar, was born on July 2, 1984, and is a renowned Indonesian cinematographer and filmmaker. She graduated from the Jakarta Institute of Arts in 2002. Her works have earned numerous accolades, including the Best Cinematography award at the 2011 Apresiasi Film Festival in Indonesia for Mata Tertutup and the Golden Globe Award (Malaysia) in 2018 for Seen and Unseen. She also received Best Cinematography nominations at the Indonesian Film Festival (FFI) for Night Bus (2017) and Tanah Surga Katanya (2012). Her cinematography credits also include the Netflix original film A World Without (2021).

Her experience as a cinematographer brings depth and a distinct identity to her films. Her unique visual style, combined with a passion for storytelling, further enhances her directorial craft. Since beginning her career as a cinematographer in 2011, Anggi has gained wide recognition as the first Indonesian woman to win international awards in cinematography. She is committed to honing her intuitive approach to filmmaking while continuously refining her skills. From 2019 to 2021, she served as Chairperson of the Indonesian Society of Cinematographers (ICS).

Anggi’s directorial debut, the 2017 documentary Negeri Dongeng, allowed her to explore narrative techniques from a director’s perspective. In 2019, she further demonstrated her talent with the Disney original film Nona.

In the process of constructing Tegar's world, this "we" has continuously welcomed new members—screenwriters, directors, actors, cinematographers, sound engineers... How does the formal creation of the film find empathy from the perspective of disability (though in reality, it is the perspective of the able-bodied)? This exploration essentially employs the lens of Tegar's disabled body to reveal the world (in form) as he perceives it, a world that ought to be felt by others, rather than one defined solely by the able-bodied's accustomed views and dismissive "that's just how it is." Thus, it expands the perceptual boundaries of the able-bodied in terms of what they see and hear, or rather, it helps them reclaim lost aspects of the world's form, thereby redefining its content. Following Tegar's perspective, when he finally breaks free from the constraints of his living environment and embarks on his journey to education, society as a whole begins to embrace this boy's path. Once deemed a child who couldn't even stay home alone without risk, he not only contributes unique expressions of joy, fear, anxiety, and happiness to the world but also discovers that the attention and assistance others offer him actually redefine the divide between ability and disability—I approach you, I help you because of "us," not to affirm or reinforce that "you" are different from "me" due to disability.

For the audience,

witnessing Tegar lose the ability to embrace yet persistently seek the world's embrace
with courage inevitably raises this question:
If we define dreams as that which makes us who we are,
then in chasing them,
are we also pursuing an ultimate embrace for some inherent incompleteness within?