A seventeen-year-old Minahasan girl dreams of becoming a filmmaker and discovers that education does not live only inside schools, but also in elders, language, plants, food, stories, memory, and the land.
Indigenous Coming-of-Age
The Universe Is a Place of Learning
Universe Is University is a lo-fi speculative coming-of-age feature set in a Minahasan Indigenous village in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. The film follows Wulan Karema, a young woman who begins filming village life with a smartphone while searching for a story that belongs to her.
Logline
In a Minahasan village in North Sulawesi, Wulan, a teenage orphan with a phone and a dream of becoming a filmmaker, builds an Indigenous school in the forest with her friends. When ancestral visions begin guiding her and religious fear turns the village against the school, Wulan must protect the learning space and prove that knowledge once pushed aside may be essential to the future.
The Story
A Young Filmmaker Searches for a Story of Her Own
Wulan Karema is seventeen years old and lives in Wuwuk with her uncle, Kal, a former lecturer, writer, and filmmaker who returned to village life. Wulan wants to become a filmmaker and dreams of reaching Hollywood, but the deeper search is for identity, responsibility, and a story rooted in home.
With Sera, Meri, Alo, and other young people, Wulan creates a learning space where elders, farmers, healers, cooks, storytellers, forests, rivers, food, plants, and the moon become sources of knowledge. The group studies language, medicinal plants, Minahasan food, oral history, spiritual memory, and relationships with the land.
Suspicion grows around the learning space. Ancestral knowledge is accused of being dangerous, Wulan faces pressure, and the school is eventually burned. In the aftermath, Wulan begins to understand that Indigenous education cannot be contained—or destroyed—by a building.
Papendangan Upus
An Indigenous Learning Space Rooted in Love
Papendangan refers to a Minahasan system or institution of learning. In the story, the young people’s learning space develops into Papendangan Upus. Upus means love or affection and also carries the memory of Wulan’s father.
Papendangan Upus is not defined by walls, a roof, or formal certification. It is an approach to education grounded in place, relationships, memory, responsibility, and the conviction that every part of the living world can become a source of knowledge.
Key Characters
A Generation Learning Together
Wulan Karema
A sharp, funny, stubborn, and ambitious seventeen-year-old who uses her phone as camera, diary, witness, and mirror.
Uncle Kal
Wulan’s guardian, a former lecturer, writer, and filmmaker whose humour carries grief, unfinished dreams, and responsibility.
Sera, Meri, and Alo
Young people whose dreams in writing, healing, food, and creativity become part of the learning space.
Oma Since
An elder and Indigenous healer whose knowledge of plants and healing has survived accusation and fear.
Themes
What the Film Explores
Indigenous Education
The film questions the belief that valid knowledge belongs only inside formal institutions.
Youth and Storytelling
Wulan’s filmmaking journey asks what it means to tell a story from within community life.
Ancestral Memory
Dreams and spiritual memory connect the visible and unseen without turning Indigenous experience into spectacle.
Land and the Future
The project asks what knowledge is needed for survival and how a generation can move forward without abandoning the source of life.
Why This Film Now
What Forms of Knowledge Are Needed for Survival?
Many young people are educated away from roots, language, and land. Indigenous knowledge is often dismissed as primitive, dangerous, or irrelevant, even while the climate crisis exposes the limits of systems built on extraction and forgetting.
The film is specific to Minahasa, but its emotional questions reach further: What do we inherit? What do we abandon? What can become possible when a generation returns with courage?
Project Information
Film Details
Format
Feature film
Genre
Lo-fi speculative / Indigenous coming-of-age
Country
Indonesia
Setting
Minahasa, North Sulawesi
Status
Script development
Writer
Kalfein Wuisan
Development
Wuwuk Film
Language
Indonesian, Manado Malay, and Tontemboan
Tone and Visual Approach
Humour, Tenderness, Grief, and Spiritual Mystery
The camera remains close to texture: hands touching books, wet roads, leaves, cooking smoke, old photographs, forest light, ash on paper, and Wulan’s phone screen as both tool and witness.
Speculative elements remain intimate and culturally grounded. Ancestral presence enters through rhythm, light, sound, movement, dreams, and memory rather than through spectacle.
Currently Seeking
Development and Production Partnerships
- script-development programmes and laboratories;
- development funding;
- dramaturgical and script consultation;
- producers and co-production partners;
- partners committed to Indigenous-led storytelling;
- future production and distribution conversations.
Project Materials
Discuss Universe Is University
Treatment, screenplay, and additional project materials are available for relevant development, funding, production, and distribution conversations.