Melbourne-based Indonesian filmmaker takes out ReelOzInd! Best Film Award for 2025
Thata Debora Agnessia
The first images in this tender film are of a father tidying up books, old boxes and brushing dust from a forgotten corner. Each movement feels almost ritualistic. When asked why the father in the film never stops tidying up, filmmaker Trivita Tiffany Winataputri smiles. “It’s a metaphor,” she said. “The father is passing on his legacy, cleaning up is his way of letting go.”
That simple act of tidying is the emotional centre of You, Me and That Chair (Kau, Aku, dan Kursi Itu), the winning short film of the 2025 ReelOzInd Festival. Co-directed by Trivita and Matt Wallace, and produced by Lawrence Phelan, the story is an adaptation of a poem written by Trivita’s father in memory, loss and the quiet language between a father and his children.
Trivita’s own story begins at home. She grew up surrounded by words. Her father, a lifelong poet, often captured family moments through verses. When one of her younger siblings left Indonesia, he wrote a poem about distance, change and quiet love.
The poem’s final verse compared life to a rambutan tree (Nephelium lappaceum), its roots deep and its fruit falling away, an image of love that holds and releases at once.
Trivita never expected the award, “I didn’t come from a filmmaking background,” she said “I studied marketing. I used to enable other people’s projects. But there was a time, I wanted to tell my own story.” She laughs, remembering how uncertain it felt at first. “I just wanted to make something that felt real.”
The pandemic became the turning point. Stuck between borders, “during the pandemic, I missed home more than ever,” she recalled. “I found poems my father wrote. I started sharing them on Instagram.”
To her surprise, the response was immediate and emotional. “Some of my friends told me they called their mothers after reading it,” she said, laughing softly. “It moved me. That’s when I started thinking about how to translate that feeling into a visual form.”
She built the story around small objects, or everyday things that hold meaning, like a spinning top, an old chair, boxes and kwetiau (Chinese dish). Each object became a vessel for memory. “The spinning top represents time looping,” she explains. “The chair, the boxes, the tidying, they’re symbols of inheritance. And the kwetiau, well, they’re the love we often forget to talk about.”
One of the film’s most subtle yet powerful symbols is the chair itself. For Trivita, the chair isn’t just a piece of furniture but it’s a keeper of memory with its scratches, warmth and all the traces of life. That chair witnessed everything. It holds the weight of time
It’s where the father sits to reflect, and where the children return, almost instinctively, to remember. As the story unfolds, the chair embodies the act of holding space for love, for memory, for what remains after letting go.
The production itself was as humble as the story it told. Shot in just two days inside a rented house in Melbourne, the team created a home from scratch. “Our art director literally brought their own furniture,” Trivita said, laughing. “We even bought IKEA stuff and returned it the next day.” Despite the constraints, the film feels intimate and lived-in.
The cinematographer captured the atmosphere in soft natural light, creating frames that feel both domestic and sacred. And the film itself is paced with silence and pauses while using music to make the film breathe for its opening.
One of the film’s most striking qualities is how emotionally precise it feels. With her father playing the lead, Trivita was able to explore the most personal and tender aspects of memory and family life. Even the child actors were guided to deliver their lines naturally to create the qualities that make family moments real.
Trivita’s reflections reveal the heart of the film. “Letting go of your child is probably one of the hardest parts. And similarly, letting go of your parents.”
She hopes that audiences feel that same quiet, enduring love. In the small, intimate gestures of tidying up, preserving objects of memory, where You, Me and That Chair discovers its deepest emotional truth.
Debora is a law student at Antakusuma University, born in Pangkalan Bun on March 28, 2004. She is a proud Dayak, passionate about social justice and Indigenous rights. She co-founded and now leads Mardaheka, the university’s first student press. She is a journalist with the Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN) and on the National Council, Indigenous Community Journalists Association in AMAN. Debora worked at the AIC as an AIYEP intern in November 2025.
Listen to Trivita’s interview together with ReelOzInd! Festival director, Jemma Purdey, on ABC Radio National’s Sunday Extra program.
