DOCUMENTARY 01 - 20 YEARS AND OTHER UNTRANSLATABILITIES

Alexandra Kumala works as a writer, filmmaker, and alterdisciplinary artist. With film, sound, and literary practices, she reimagines ways of storytelling in nontraditional forms, inviting audiences to new ways of seeing, listening, and relating. Her body of work exists to explore the silences between buried grief and swallowed rage, to trace the language of absence within untranslatable experiences, and to find ways to express the emotions that transcend words and explanation.

In particular, her work is largely influenced by an upbringing between islands in the Nusantara archipelago and her mixed identity as a Tionghoa-Peranakan woman whose stories & silences spill across borders & generations.

Her films have screened at the Museum of Moving Image, Casa de la Cultura Diego Rivera, Musée de Guellala, Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Lichtblick-Kino, Film Coop NYC, Palestine House London, and at galleries, museums, and film festivals globally. Her writing has appeared in literary journals and anthology books, including “A History of Photography in Indonesia,” shortlisted for the Historical Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles.

Born in Jakarta and formerly based in New York City, she was a recipient of the NYSCA Artists Grant, the Queens Arts Fund, the NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music & Theatre, and the George Stoney Fellowship. Her work has received support from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Field, Indiespace, NYSCA, NYC DCLA, Queens Council on the Arts, NYC MOME, and the Northwest Film Forum, among others. Previously, she worked in theatre and translation, both of which influence her filmmaking, and was one half of the team behind Sugar Nutmeg, the long-form podcast and platform focusing on Southeast Asia, named after the spices whose trade route shaped our world today.

With a multicultural upbringing and itinerant life across continents, her storytelling has always involved multiple forms and multiple languages, inviting audiences to look more deeply into cultural hybridity, multiplicity, intricate entanglements, and unexpected interconnectedness. Being a minority in all the places she has ever called home deeply shapes her work as an artist. Today, she makes films and writes essays about untranslatability and the constant shifting of borders, language, and power.