Siman is a man of few words who lives in a quiet rural village in Indonesia in the 1960s. By sheer chance, he witnesses people shooting a video of an astronaut landing on the moon. Unfortunately, he gets caught and gets his tongue cut off. After the incident, Siman begins to live in slow motion, like the astronauts in spacesuits walking on the moon, and the villagers think him crazy.
Through his third film The Science of Fictions, Director Yosep Anggi NOEN once again questions the history of Indonesia and the relationship between history and an individual’s life. Under multiple layers of context—the worldwide Cold War, world powers in a space race, and the 1960s Indonesia, where a military coup d’état was followed by massacres and violence to justify the coup—the film presents the life of Siman in order as he, a victim of great violence, is placed under the yoke of exploitation and meanwhile becomes a perpetrator of sexual exploitation. It indeed shows the ‘science of fictions’, as if saying that all this could not have been possible if it were not one huge joke. (PARK Sun Young)