On Your Lap

1998, and Indonesia is in economic crisis. Sartika is pregnant and leaves the city for a village on the coast; she wants to build another life for her child. Work is not easy to find. There is a coffee house in the village where the women serve by sitting on the customers' laps; that is what the job is called. Sartika starts working. The village knows about it and the same village shames these women. Time passes, the child is born and grows. The mother does not know how to explain the work to her child. Reza Rahadian directs; it is his first film as a director and he wrote the script with Felix K. Nesi. Claresta Taufan plays Sartika. Fedi Nuril, Christine Hakim and Shakeel Fauzi Aisy are in the cast. It is an Indonesian production. Reza Rahadian is one of Indonesia's best known actors and stepped behind the camera for this film. The film had its world premiere at the 2025 Busan Film Festival, where it won four prizes including the audience award. It took the award for best first Asian film at the QCinema festival in the Philippines. It opened in Indonesia on 6 November and reached more than five hundred and fifty thousand admissions, a large figure for an independent drama. The matter it treats is judgment; the film neither defends nor accuses these women, it only shows the arithmetic. The narrative keeps the crisis years in the background and puts poverty as the cause. The film shoots the coastal village and the sea plainly. The ending gives no easy solution. Its limit is pace; the narrative is slow, little happens, and the tone heavy. Who it is for: viewers who like Southeast Asian cinema and social drama. Who it is not for: it is slow, heavy, and the ending rueful.