Ave Maryam

The whole point of this movie is to be artisanal, beautiful cinematography and sparse dialogue. This leaves a lot to be desired in terms of character depth, musical scoring, and any kind of plot.

As my review headline stated, this will be very subjective according to me, my nostalgia to he exact.

I spent my chuldhood and adolescent elyears studying at a Marsudirini school in North Jakarta. It is an Asisi Fransiscan order school with a Sister as headmistress. They can dish out discipline and tough love like no one else, but they're all actually kind hearts.

The older sisters in the movie reminded me very much of my school's headmistresses. They too go to such nursing home in Semarang when their age caught up to them.

And the location's architecture and especially interior design details really is likw my school looked like. Tiles high on walls, faded pastel colors almost everywhere, that distinct style on doors and window railings, arching door frames and so on.

About the movie itself, I like how the direction kind of took a big chunk of the style of Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai, telling its story strongly through combination of every element shown on screen and jot just theough dialogue. Thus the dialogue here fan often feel so very short, but it is sharp with less wasted words. I particularly liked the dinner scene, so creative and impactful.

The cinematography is a feast for the eyes, incorporating various angles, calmed color palette, and litlle camera movement which enhanced the aura of stillness commonly found in these kinds of places.

The acting was solid, the leads and supporting cast all gave out good performances.

Cutting off Maryam's background really affects the perception of her character dynamics and leaves some pieces missing, primarily since they intended to show her inner struggles at the monastery. While perhaps the crew wanted to have subtlety as the main element of this film within the performance, the cinematography, and the dialogues, it unfortunately resulted in a lack of cohesion. The main attractiveness that pulls Maryam and Yosef is practically non-existent, some of the scenes contained rather pretentious lines than reflections of the wisdom from the bible, and the emotions only peaked in the third act after the slow-paced first and second acts filled with misinterpretation of "ascetic" with stale. On a lighter note, I hope this film will bring more ideas amongst Indonesian filmmakers, that religion outside the majority religion as well as cities outside Jakarta and Bali, can be equally beautiful on screen.

7,5 for the story and 9 for the DOP. This film has a simple story but the DOP and cinematography amazing

This Film is so beautiful with excellent cinematography. The movie is not a religious film (like I thought before) but a love story, a forbidden one, a story of lust and guilt. Sometimes love can be complicated but stil it is Beautiful. The performaces of Maudy as Maryam is awesome. She is "the star" of the Movie😊 and I love the set.. Especially when Pastor Josef have his orchestra playing at Lawang Sewu Semarang. Beautiful..❤