Indigenous youth return from cities to villages and ancestral territories—not to move backward, but to build another future through land, food, knowledge, culture, and collective work.
Indonesian Indigenous Youth Return to the Community
Returning Home to Build Another Future
Homecoming Movement follows Indigenous youth in Indonesia who choose to return to villages after studying or living in cities. The return reconnects young people with ancestral territories, community responsibilities, food production, Indigenous education, and locally rooted forms of sustainable development.
Logline
Facing deforestation, pollution, land grabbing, and the loss of young energy from villages, Indigenous youth return to ancestral territories and build new paths through farming, education, cultural work, environmental protection, and community organisation.
Synopsis
The Village Is Not a Place Left Behind
Education and city life are often presented as a one-way journey away from the village. Young people leave to study or work, while ancestral territories lose future leaders, working energy, and continuity of knowledge.
Homecoming Movement turns that assumption around. Indigenous youth return with skills, confidence, and plans for organic farming, herbal gardens, community economies, Indigenous schools, ecological restoration, and the documentation of ancestral territories.
The film presents homecoming as a cultural, ecological, political, and economic decision. Returning is not nostalgia and not evidence of failure. It is a conscious choice to build a future from the place where rights, knowledge, identity, and responsibility are rooted.
From “Ilmu Pergi” to a Reverse Flow
Questioning One Narrow Idea of Success
The movement responds to a pattern sometimes described as ilmu pergi: education and employment push Indigenous youth farther from kampung, ancestral knowledge, and customary territories. Success becomes associated with permanent departure.
Homecoming creates an arus balik, or reverse flow. The film is not anti-city and does not reject education. It asks whether education can also strengthen villages and whether success can include returning with knowledge, imagination, and responsibility.
Why Return?
What Is at Stake When Young People Leave
Future Leadership
Villages need young energy, organising capacity, and new generations prepared to carry community responsibilities.
Knowledge Continuity
Language, customary law, food systems, place names, stories, ecological practice, and elder knowledge require living transmission.
Territorial Protection
Customary territories become more vulnerable to land grabbing, extractive projects, forest loss, and outside claims when community presence weakens.
Community Economy
Returning youth can develop food production, farming groups, livestock, herbal gardens, ecotourism, and locally controlled economic initiatives.
The Movement in Practice
Six Connected Paths of Return
Language, history, customary law, land, forests, rivers, food, ritual, and cultural practice.
Elder testimony, sacred places, place names, graves, migration routes, and territorial boundaries.
Farming, gardens, livestock, herbal plots, collective work, and community-controlled food systems.
Documentation of forests, rivers, boundaries, ecological change, and threats to customary territories.
Community organisation, rights advocacy, political participation, and regeneration of Indigenous leadership.
Film, photography, writing, graphics, and smartphone documentation created from within communities.
Filmmaking Approach
Listening before Filming
The story grew from proximity to village life and Indigenous youth organising, not from an outside search for a subject. Planning began through conversation, trust, and presence. A small team followed the rhythm of community life rather than imposing a rigid production schedule.
Smartphones enabled young Indigenous filmmakers from different territories to record work, faces, land, silence, relationships, and practical action. The aim was to create a film with dignity rather than turn communities into objects.
Film Information
Project Details
Official Title
Homecoming: Indonesian Indigenous Youth Return to the Community
Format
Short documentary
Duration
8 minutes 20 seconds
Released
November 2021
Location
Indonesia
Production Method
Filmed by Indigenous filmmakers using smartphones
Production Partner
If Not Us Then Who?
Movement Context
Gerakan Pulang Kampung · BPAN / AMAN
Indigenous Filmmakers
A Collective Film Made across Territories
The film was made by young Indigenous filmmakers using smartphones:
Arwan Oscar · Ergkos Kosasih · Sucia Lisdamara · Alqadri Arsyad · Ramlan · Kalfein Wuisan
Screening and Dialogue
APCEIU × SIMA · 2026
The film was presented through an APCEIU and SIMA screening and live dialogue focused on Indigenous storytelling, youth, land, reverse migration, community resilience, and the meaning of returning home.
Watch the Film
Watch Homecoming
The full film and official project information are available through If Not Us Then Who?