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This is a subtitled version of the film De Groote Postweg (The Great Post Road), a documentary about the construction of one of the largest infrastructure projects of the early 19th century undertaken by Dutch colonists in Java. The documentary follows the route of the road from beginning to end and uses the modern conditions of the places it transects to provide a cross-section of daily life in the twilight days of the Soeharto era. The film is grim and at times relentless in its pessimistic outlook on Indonesian history, but is nonetheless a vital document containing parts of history that have been deliberately covered up by the Soeharto regime and even subsequent democratic governments. The film was originally released by in the Netherlands by Pieter van Huystee in 1996, and primarily consists of interview footage from a number of different figures from a wide variety of positions in Javanese society. The film was directed by Bernie Ijdis and is narrated by Indonesian dissident author Pramoedya Ananta Toer, using sections from his essay Jalan Raya Pos/Jalan Daendels. The essay was the last work released before Pramoedya’s death in 2006. This is, to my knowledge, the only full English translation of the film or essay in existence. I couldn’t find a version without the original Dutch subtitles, so I had to leave them in. The original version (for Dutch speakers) can be found here: I translated directly from Indonesian to English using my own transcription of the dialogue. I have zero knowledge of Dutch, so I’m not sure what specific lines of dialogue appear in the original subtitles, although I tried to capture a little more of the dialogue than the original subtitles did. My lack of Dutch also meant that I had to use a mix of Google Translate and guesswork to translate all of the Dutch titles that appear in the credits and such, so I’m sorry if I made any big mistakes there. I own none of the rights to the film, aside from the translation which is my own.
