Stealing Raden Saleh

Piko is a university student who forges paintings. While doing cheap work he receives an offer: steal Raden Saleh's painting The Arrest of Prince Diponegoro from the state palace and leave a copy in its place. He assembles a crew, all students, none of them professionals. Angga Dwimas Sasongko directs. Iqbaal Ramadhan plays Piko and Angga Yunanda plays Ucup. The choice of painting is not incidental. Raden Saleh was the first major Indonesian painter trained in Europe in the nineteenth century, and this work depicts the arrest of Prince Diponegoro by the Dutch from an Indonesian point of view. The heist therefore turns not around an artwork but around a national symbol. The film is new in genre terms for Indonesia. The country had no heist tradition; this takes the shape from American and Korean models and sets it on a local subject. It was a large commercial success and among the most watched Indonesian films of 2022. The narrative is faithful to the rules: assembling a crew, the plan, the failure, the reversal. What is new is the subject and the setting; Jakarta's government buildings, the university and the traffic give the film its texture. Who it is for: viewers who follow heist films and Southeast Asian popular cinema. Who it is not for: the planning scenes over explain, there are too many characters, and the final turn does not leave the template.