Filmmaker Soma Helmi on Bringing AAPI Leads and Indonesian Mythologies to “The Angkasa Legacy”

Mixed Asian Media - June 8, 2022

By Lauren Lola

It’s fair to say that there’s been a lot going on for writer and director Soma Helmi within the past year. After being one of the mentees in the inaugural MAM Labs for the screenplay she and Sam Boyer co-wrote, Super Nova, their collaboration has since gone on to be featured in the 2021 CAPE List. She also was a fellow in the 2021 ViewFinder Emerging Directors Program and recently was named one of the winners of CAPE’s inaugural Julia S. Gouw Short Film Challenge.

In retrospect, Helmi looks at these most recent accomplishments for her as kind of a slow burn. She doesn’t know why, but she suspects it’s because she’s been at it for so long that it’s only now that it’s all starting to come together.

“I've been working really hard towards it, and I know that, especially in these last two years, it's been really hard to get a lot of traction,” she said. “It's really rewarding to have things start to move and get your work recognized and all that kind of stuff.”

Recently, her sights are set on getting her sci-fi short film, The Angkasa Legacy, out into the world. Starring Yoshi Sudarso, it follows an Indonesian American man who, in the aftermath of his sister’s death, discovers he has extraterrestrial powers during a weekend getaway.

It’s a two-fold answer for Helmi regarding how the story initially came to her and why it was important for her to pursue it. One of the reasons is that she wants to see an Indonesian-led sci-fi work. The word “angkasa” means space or sky in Indonesian.

“Sci-fi is my favorite genre, sci-fi and fantasy,” she explained. “I love genre films, and I love making genre films, especially more grounded ones that have that talk about the multicultural experience of being othered and all this. A lot of things that I like to talk about in all my films. I was like, well, why has there never been an Indonesian led sci-fi, let alone a romantic sci-fi or any kind of Indonesian romance lead in any of these, especially Western led films? And so that pushed me to write it.”

The other reason is that it would give her the opportunity to work with Yoshi, for whom she’s been wanting to work with for quite a while.

Initially envisioned as a feature-length film, Helmi made The Angkasa Legacy as a 20-minute short film. The reason: funding.

“Of course, if we had full funding for a feature, we'd go right in, but that's the honest answer,” she elaborated. “We had a limited amount of funding. Actually, when I first wrote it, I didn't even know if we would get any funding. I just wrote it as something that a few friends could get together and shoot what we could manage with our resources and if it picked up and it had a lot of interest, I was like, well, I want to make it as a feature, which is what we're trying to do now.”

It's what led to her launching a Kickstarter campaign for The Angkasa Legacy. While she initially wasn’t planning on it, one of the producers encouraged her to do so, saying that it would receive a lot of public support. She was right, as the campaign wound up being about 165% fully funded.

It was an intense process for Helmi, as she recalled. “It was a lot of work, and I know, going into it, I was told by a couple of different friends who have been through it that it's a lot of work and a lot of stress, and I believed them, but I didn't understand it until I started doing it. It was really, really hard work. We did a 30-day campaign, and it was just work every day, basically. You cannot sleep on it because the numbers fall and then you have to generate more interest.”

It also proved to be a true learning experience for her. For instance, while she didn’t understand it in the beginning, her campaign was successful because she tapped into her own network. That’s where a majority of the support came from.

Aside from Yoshi, Helmi knew she wanted the rest of the cast to be AAPI as well. Other actors featured include Peter Sudarso (Yoshi’s brother), Lulu Antariksa, Miki Ishikawa, Simmi Singh, and Tania Gunadi. Because of limited resources and the fact that The Angkasa Legacy is a passion project, Helmi’s scope of potential actors also became limited. However, it wound up all working out, especially since a lot of the actors already knew each other.

“Everyone was really, really great,” she hailed. “They're all an incredible bunch of actors to start off with. I think that's always where I start. Whoever I cast and whoever I reach out to, the number one thing is their performance and what they can bring to the character because, are they going to serve the story? And yes, they do happen to all be incredibly beautiful, bonus. There's a lot of bonuses that come with that, but they're all incredible performers and to me, it was really important.”

The Angkasa Legacy was shot over one weekend, at a house offered up by one of the Kickstarter supporters. Dream sequences were shot on a green screen studio, and exterior shots of Indonesia were filmed and sent over by filmmaker friends of Helmi’s. Her crew was small yet ambitious, which resulted in the completion of the short film.

Of those who’ve already seen the film (including the Kickstarter supporters), the response so far has been great. “There were a lot of really lovely notes that came back, and people were so happy that they had contributed to it,” she said, “because they really loved the film, and it's been really good to hear back because I think, not only are people really supportive of it, but a lot of people were saying things like, ‘Oh, I could totally see this on TV right now,’ which was really cool.”

The Angkasa Legacy will be making its world premiere at the Bali International Film Festival this June. As the film starts to be made available to audiences, it will be made so to producers and production houses as well, in hopes of generating interest in making it something more. Helmi does not consider herself much of a development person, and so for now, she’s focused on just showing people the concept and hope it generates more interest, especially since down the line, she would want to shoot part of the feature film in Indonesia.

“It’s not a small undertaking, so it's going to be quite a serious project,” she remarked. “So whoever that we team up with, I really want to make sure that they understand that part of this has to be set in Indonesia for real.”

Yoshi’s character is the most recent person of many generations in his family to play host to an extraterrestrial force. With so much story to explore, that even brings a lot of Indonesian mythologies into the mix, making The Angkasa Legacy into a feature film would allow for Helmi to do so.

“If anybody wants to come forward and help us out, that would be amazing,” she said. “We are looking for people to partner with and figure out how to get this into the world, because I just think it's such an important story; in terms of representation, and what we've never seen before, and having an AAPI — but not just that, an Indonesian lead — leading a romantic sci-fi would be so incredible.”

Lauren Lola is an author, freelance writer, playwright, and screenwriter from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of the novels, An Absolute Mind and A Moment’s Worth. She has written plays that have been produced both virtually and in-person for theatre groups on the West Coast of the United States, and has penned the short films, “Breath of Writing” and “Interview with an Aswang.” Aside from Mixed Asian Media, Lauren has also had writing featured on The Nerds of Color, CAAMedia, PBS, YOMYOMF, and other outlets and publications.

You can find Lauren on Twitter and Instagram @akolaurenlola and on her website, www.lolabythebay.wordpress.com.