Mbah Jhiwo
The ancient soul
Alvaro Gurrea / Spain / 2021 / 93 min / Colour
Italian premiere
Yono, or Mbah Jhiwo (Ancient Soul), is one of the humble miners who daily quarry and haul heavy sulfur rocks from the flank of the Kawah Ijen volcano, west of Java. When he is abandoned by his wife Oliv and at the same time finds himself having to look after his elderly mother who has fallen seriously ill, Yono refuses to succumb to events and seeks answers to problems of the heart and of health. The inscrutable routes of time then offer him the possibility of asking the same questions to animism, Islam and capitalism, so that Yono can draw three different answers. Only the volcano remains unchangeable, with its request for sacrifice and its inexhaustible fumigating of toxic vapours, which blur outlines and blur borders, like the film itself. Mbah Jhiwo is a magnetic and mysterious work, which moves freely between anthropological documentary, metaphor and imaginative parable.
Alvaro Gurrea
Álvaro Gurrea was born in Barcelona in 1988. He attended a master's programme in creative documentary at the Pompeu Fabra University and, in 2016, made the short film Crossboundaries. Fascinated by Indonesia, he spent long stays there and in 2019 he began shooting his feature film debut, Mbah Jhiwo, presented in the Forum section of the Berlinale 2021.
Credits
Screenplay Alvaro GurreaCinematography Alvaro GurreaSound Tommy TomjarEditing Manuel Muñoz RivasProducer Rocio Mesa
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