My Own Last Supper Shanghai Film Festival debut brought Chinese-Indonesian history and identity to the global spotlight this week, as Ismail Basbeth’s film premiered in competition at the Shanghai International Film Festival.
The narrative centers on Encek, a 76-year-old widower who convenes his children for a final dinner, unveiling concealed memoirs of love, loss and generational wounds before choosing the sea as his reunion place with his deceased wife. That premise — intimate on its surface, historically charged underneath — gives the film its quiet devastation. The dinner table becomes a space of confession and reckoning, and the sea at the end functions less as resolution than as a kind of homecoming the living cannot follow. The story examines the pursuit of life and identity through the lens of a Chinese-Indonesian family across three pivotal periods: the 1960s, 1970s and 1998, addressing unresolved national trauma and historical violence through intimate personal narratives.
That third date — 1998 — carries enormous weight in Indonesian history. The racial violence of that year, when ethnic Chinese Indonesians were targeted in widespread riots and killings, has long been a subject of enforced silence in public discourse. The film approaches it obliquely rather than head-on. A throwaway line at the start describes how a Chinese character has had to register his business under his, supposedly, native Indonesian son-in-law — the kind of detail that speaks volumes without requiring explanation for those who know the history, and that carries a slow-burning revelation for those who don’t. It is precisely the sort of filmmaking that trusts its audience to sit with discomfort rather than be guided through it.
The film had its world premiere in competition at the Shanghai International Film Festival, a fitting debut for a work that is as much addressed to mainland Chinese audiences as it is to anyone else. Producer Lyza Anggraheni confirmed that the production team is actively seeking Chinese distribution partners, with the film designed from the outset to reach mainland audiences. “We knew this would be a pioneering film focusing on Chinese-Indonesians,” Anggraheni said, adding that the team is “working hard to connect with Chinese film distributors, hoping to bring this movie officially to the Chinese market, as the film was inherently made to pass down and share the story of Chinese-Indonesians.”
The timing is not incidental. Stories of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia have been very much on audiences’ radar in recent months, with the runaway success of Dear You at the Chinese box office. That film, directed by Lan Hongchun and spoken primarily in Teochew Min, follows a grandson who travels to Thailand in search of the grandfather his grandmother spent her life waiting for. Released in China on April 30, it became the country’s second-highest-grossing film of 2026 to date, earning over $246 million at the local box office, and carries a 9.2 out of 10 score on Douban, placing it among the top-rated Chinese releases of the last decade. The appetite for diaspora stories told with emotional directness and historical grounding is clearly there.
My Own Last Supper arrives at that opening from a genuinely different vantage point — it is not a Chinese film about Chinese people abroad, but an Indonesian film made by a non-Chinese director about a community that has spent generations negotiating its place inside Indonesia. Basbeth addressed the language tension during the Q&A: “Language is a political tool, but at the same time, it is also our culture. That is why we were confused during production. Do we need to make the film in Indonesian first, or should we shoot in Chinese language first? And which dialect of Chinese? Hakka? Hokkien?” The question is not rhetorical. Chinese-Indonesians speak different dialects depending on ancestry and region, and the choice of language in a film like this carries implications that extend well beyond aesthetics.
His answer was, in a sense, the film itself: “We need some universal tool or some ways to connect us all, but at the same time, embracing our roots and identity, and cinema is a way we do that. I believe cinema is a language too.“
Lead actor Jessy Davita, whose own grandfather emigrated from China, expressed deep pride in presenting the film publicly. Cast member Chen was similarly direct about the personal stakes: “As a third-generation Chinese-Indonesian, I wanted to showcase the real-life situations and experiences of Chinese-Indonesians living locally.” Chen added that having lived through both the 1990s and the present decade gave the work particular meaning — “I experience all of the life as a Chinese born in Indonesia, so it means so much for me, to represent the Chinese people who live in Indonesia.”
Basbeth, whose previous feature Sara had its world premiere at Busan in 2023, shot My Own Last Supper over just fifteen days in Indonesia, reuniting with director of photography Satria Kurnianto. He is already at work on his next film, Love Letters of Our Life, set in 1995 and revolving around a long-lost romance that reunites after 35 years, with several crew members from Supper joining the production. That film will also engage with Chinese heritage in Indonesia, suggesting Basbeth is developing a sustained body of work around a community whose stories have largely been told, when told at all, by outsiders or not at all.
The Shanghai International Film Festival runs through June 21.
Source Note: Portions of this report draw upon on-site reporting and interview material originally published by Variety during the 2026 Shanghai International Film Festival. All analysis, contextualization, and editorial commentary are by EntertainLens.
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