Yulia Evina Bhara, the Indonesian producer who wins festivals and still fights for audiences

Yulia Evina Bhara

Born	July 1, 1982 Way Kanan, Lampung, Indonesia
Occupation	Politician

Most producers keep the plumbing out of sight; Yulia Evina Bhara describes it. “Being a producer in Southeast Asia means that you have to do all the work by yourself, from development, financing, and producing to distribution,” she told Variety, and she named the last of those as the hardest. That sentence explains her career better than her prize list does. Her Jakarta company, KawanKawan Media, has carried films by Indonesian, Malaysian, Vietnamese, Singaporean and Japanese directors into Cannes, Venice, Locarno, Toronto and Busan, and many of them came home with awards. Getting the same films in front of audiences in their own countries has been the slower fight. This month she placed a different kind of bet: an alliance of Asia’s independent producers, with her name on the secretariat.

Her first trade was theatre, and she learned it on the job. For roughly seven years she produced stage work, most of it on historical and humanitarian subjects, before turning to film through the Yayasan Partisipasi Indonesia. With the actress Happy Salma she co-founded the cultural foundation Titimangsa. In theatre, she has said, “your job is done when the curtains are closed”; in film, the job has only started once the picture is finished.

She was born on 1 July 1982 in Way Kanan, a regency in Lampung province on Sumatra. KawanKawan Media came in 2016, its name built on the Indonesian word for friend or companion, and so did her first feature. Solo, Solitude, released at home as Istirahatlah Kata-Kata, followed the poet Wiji Thukul during his months in hiding in Pontianak before his disappearance. The idea grew out of a mural project honouring Indonesian poets that Bhara worked on with the writer Okky Madasari and the women’s rights activist Tunggal Pawestri; she then brought in Yosep Anggi Noen to direct. The film premiered in the Filmmakers of the Present section at Locarno.

Noen became a regular partner. The Science of Fictions, his story of a man who loses his tongue after stumbling on a foreign crew filming a fake moon landing, opened at Locarno in 2019 and brought Bhara a Citra Award nomination for Best Picture at the 2020 Indonesian Film Festival, and its lead, Gunawan Maryanto, won the Citra Award for Best Actor. Her first documentary came from a book she had also produced: Pemenang Kehidupan, a photo book about women imprisoned in the mass killings of 1965 and 1966. She offered the material to the director Fanny Chotimah, and You and I, about two former prisoners who made a life together, won the Asian Perspective award at the DMZ International Documentary Film Festival and the Citra Award for Best Documentary.

From there the work turned regional. Bhara co-produced Carlo Francisco Manatad’s Typhoon Haiyan drama, laced with satire, Whether the Weather Is Fine and Woo Ming Jin’s Stone Turtle, which won the FIPRESCI Prize at Locarno in 2022. That same year Makbul Mubarak’s debut Autobiography, a thriller about a young housekeeper drawn into the orbit of a retired general running for regent, won the FIPRESCI award in Venice’s Horizons section. Mubarak had first brought her the script five years earlier. A year later Amanda Nell Eu’s body-horror coming-of-age film Tiger Stripes took the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at Cannes. Both titles were then chosen as their countries’ entries for the 96th Academy Awards, Indonesia with Autobiography and Malaysia with Tiger Stripes, and neither earned a nomination. Variety put Bhara on its list of Impactful International Women in 2023.

The slate kept widening. Nelson Yeo’s Dreaming & Dying won the Golden Leopard in Locarno’s Filmmakers of the Present competition, Nicole Midori Woodford’s Last Shadow at First Light went to San Sebastián, and Noen’s 24 Hours with Gaspar premiered in Busan. In 2024 Loeloe Hendra’s Tale of the Land, about a Dayak girl orphaned by a land conflict, won the FIPRESCI award in Busan, and Dương Diệu Linh’s Don’t Cry, Butterfly won the Grand Prize of Venice Critics’ Week. In 2025 KawanKawan joined the co-production of Chie Hayakawa’s Renoir, which competed for the Palme d’Or, and Woo Ming Jin’s The Fox King, a Toronto Centrepiece selection that Malaysia has since put forward for the 99th Academy Awards.

The prize record hides a harder number. Autobiography, the most decorated film she has produced, sold 33,407 tickets during its theatrical run in Indonesia. Solo, Solitude drew 51,424 admissions in its first month, a figure Bhara called extraordinary for an independent film, which says as much about the ceiling as about the achievement. Tiger Stripes reached Malaysian screens only in a censored cut that its director disowned. The model Bhara works in, with scripts developed at European labs such as TorinoFilmLab, financing pieced together across as many as eight countries and premieres placed at Western festivals, produces films that juries reward, and it invites a fair question about whom the films are finally made for. Her own diagnosis is less romantic than her résumé: the weak link is distribution, and no festival prize fixes it.

That may explain the shift in what she spends her time on. In 2025 she sat on three juries: Critics’ Week at Cannes, the Proxima competition at Karlovy Vary and the first Competition jury in Busan’s history, under Na Hong-jin. In May she produced, with Amerta Kusuma and the programme’s curator Dominique Welinski, the first Next Step Studio, a Critics’ Week initiative that focused on Indonesia and premiered four short films by emerging directors, among them Holy Crowd and Annisa, in Cannes. In August she was credited as a co-producer on Lê Bảo’s Hearing, which premiered in Locarno’s international competition.

In October, at the Asian Contents & Film Market in Busan, after a panel on co-production where she was among the speakers, five producer organisations from South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Taiwan announced the Asian Producers Alliance, a coalition limited to independent producers, with no studios, conglomerates or state bodies. Bhara and Han Jin of the Producers Guild of Korea were named its co-secretaries general for a one-year term, with co-production across Asia and creators’ rights over their intellectual property as early priorities.

The next stops are already set. Later this month she joins the Asian Future jury at the Tokyo International Film Festival, and the alliance holds its second seminar at the JAFF Market in Yogyakarta in December. KawanKawan’s slate includes Nelson Yeo’s The Drought, Songsmith, Jilah and the Man with Two Names and Voice of Baceprot. Whether a producers’ alliance can do for distribution what the festivals have done for premieres is the question her next few years will answer.

Tags: film producers, Yulia Evina Bhara, Amanda Nell Eu, Autobiography, Makbul Mubarak, Renoir