Sebastien Tobler on How Being a ‘Third Culture Kid’ is Like Being Paralyzed in a Puzzle
Photos courtesy of production
If you had a time portal that could take you to your favorite memory of all time, would you do it? This question opens Sebastien Tobler’s debut film, This Time. Standing on a sidewalk in Los Angeles and looking at her long-lost high school sweetheart, Laela says, “You look exactly like I imagined you would.” Colin looks down to the ground, briefly avoiding her gaze, before he replies, “Maybe it’s how quickly we all left Jakarta. Some faces are just frozen in time.”
They had both been children of expatriates living in Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia — Colin is the Cantonese-British son of a British diplomat and Laela is the Korean-French daughter of a French businessman. The 1997 Asian financial crisis brought rise to peaceful student protests calling for the resignation of the Indonesian President, Suharto. However, by May 1998, the increasing political unrest had turned into violent riots by different groups throughout the city. Expatriates were evacuated from Indonesia by the foreign companies and governments that employed them. While Colin and Laela were privileged to have been able to safely flee, they were torn apart without a chance to say goodbye to one another. That is until the two of them run into each other by happenstance 23 years later at a video rental store in Los Angeles.
This Time had its New York premiere at the Asian American International Film Festival 2023 and I knew that I had to see it. As an Indonesian who grew up moving around myself, I had been waiting for a film about third-culture kids like this my whole life. I sat down with Sebastien, the Swiss-Filipino writer-director of the film who also grew up as an expat kid, over Zoom to have a conversation on doomed love stories, the highs and lows of the world of international schools and the challenges that come with pushing the boundaries of cultural identity in cinema today.
Sebastien Tobler: Obviously, I’m not Gen Z, but it’s really great to hear that the film resonated with you. I feel like there has been a lot of external impact in the world affecting people’s lives recently that creates a sort of disenchantment. How much control of my own life do I have?
I wrote this story for third culture kids, for mixed race kids — for people who grew up moving around the world a lot. People who feel a certain kind of loss of control from that kind of mobility. I think, maybe, Gen Z as a generation gets this kind of trauma. This feeling of being paralyzed in a puzzle.
Christhalia Wiloto: Something I loved about this film is that even though it explores the trauma of moving around, it wasn’t a film about trauma. I wanted to start off by highlighting that gorgeous scene about 20 minutes into the film when Colin and Laela are driving around Los Angeles in the car and she helps him light his cigarette. We don’t know anything about these two characters yet — just the suggestion that they have a history with one another — but the way that she plucks his unlit cigarette from his fingers while he’s driving and lights it up with the end of her own is so indicative of the intimacy that still lingers between them, just like the cigarette smoke that lingers between them. It’s the visual of the smoke that strikes me. Especially since this story is about two young people whose families escaped the May 1998 Jakarta riots, when so much burned to the ground. That being said, what drove you to write this film?
Thanks for that observation. I want to record that and use it because it’s such a great observation [laughs]. Not a lot of people who have interviewed me about the film caught that. The film isn’t about trauma and that scene isn’t about smoking cigarettes. It’s about that feeling of being able to see something, but you can’t touch it. And the act of smoking a cigarette itself gives you pause, it gives you a moment to think.
A white American reviewer had commented on how it was a mistake for the film to not have talked about the Jakarta riots more. He felt that I should have dug into it by reflecting more of that trauma in the characters. He noted that the riots were “underutilized.” I was like, “That’s kind of rough, dude. I don’t want to ‘utilize’ social upheaval to make a story ‘better.’”
I wrote this film because of the way I grew up. My parents were diplomats, so we were always moving around. As a kid, you have no choice. You don’t get to say, “Hey, I’d like to stick around in this place.” It’s like, No, you’re going. Especially as a teenager, when you’re trying to make connections with people and figure out who you are. Every time you move, you have to enter and navigate a whole new social structure, while you’re trying to figure yourself out, while you’re trying to figure out a new culture and a new language.
Do you think Colin and Laela ever had a chance? Even if they hadn’t been separated because they had to evacuate Jakarta due to political unrest, the nature of international students at international schools is that people always come and go.
We always play the what-if game, right? Those feelings of not being in control don’t leave you. Colin and Laela’s story is a love story, but it’s a doomed love story. That’s kind of how I grew up. The thing about being an expat is that every time you feel a strong connection to a place, it’s gone. Every time you move to a new place, you fall in love with it. You fall in love with people. You fall in love with the culture, you start to speak the language. And yet, the whole time, you know that it will all be over and you will have to move again.
I grew up in the 90s. We didn’t really start using email until 1998 or 1999. Then we had AOL and ICQ, all of these old-school chat rooms. But we didn’t use it to keep in touch, not really. In those years, when you said goodbye to someone, you were really saying goodbye.
What had been behind your decision to open a fictional romantic drama with real news footage of the May 1998 Jakarta Riots?
You know, that might actually be just the festival version.
Oh?
I opened with [this] footage because I wanted to give people context. Especially for an American audience, the riots in Jakarta isn’t a historical event that’s on their radar. I wanted to put it on the radar. In retrospect, it might have been too heavy-handed. That opening sets a very political tone to the film and that might not be what we’re going for. I wanted to focus on exploring the evacuation of expats. I didn’t want to make a political commentary. I mean, I have my opinions about what happened – but that isn’t what this movie is about.
I keep thinking about this one critic’s review — maybe, unless we go deeper into a serious subject, even the slightest of punches is too heavy-handed. Especially if it’s an issue that isn’t as well known. If I were to make a film that referenced the Vietnam War, for example, people in America already know about it, so they wouldn’t be asking questions about the history. They just focus on the story. When it’s an event that people aren’t familiar with, they’re like, “Oh, what happened? I want to know more about that.” And so, in a way, I think that ends up taking people away from the movie and the story that I’m trying to tell.
That feeling you just described of how the burden is on you to explain a specific reality that, on one hand, is a very heavy and loaded political event, but, at the same time, is also the reality that you and your characters are in. As a storyteller, how does it make you feel to negotiate with the expectation to carry the responsibility of contextualizing a non-dominant historical narrative?
That’s what it is, it is a great responsibility. Historical events that aren’t as well known deserve a deeper look. I think that’s why I’ve been reexamining the opening sequence of the film.
My thing with [Nolan’s] Oppenheimer and I’ve been going back and forth on this, is that, do we really need another white man’s perspective on how he justifies the bombing of all of these people? At the same time, this historical moment is such a massive thing to talk about. No one thing — maybe a book, a giant book — no one thing can be all-encompassing of all the different facets of this historical moment. As an artist, you sort of have to accept that you won’t be able to tell the whole story of historical trauma in one format of art. I’ve been trying to reconcile with that understanding. In This Time, I can only talk about the degree to which the riots impacted Colin and Laela – the characters in this particular story.
We premiered This Time in May, which was exactly 25 years since the riots. That wasn’t planned, it was just a random coincidence. Thank you for asking this question, because now I can verbalize how I am reconciling with the responsibility of the political context of this film. It’s great, this is like therapy.
Do they talk about this in Indonesia? Do you know?
About the May 1998 Jakarta Riots? See, that’s a complicated question for me to answer myself, too. I grew up moving around and attending international schools. Even when I moved back to Jakarta, I went to an international school. This wasn’t a history that was taught to me at school. I graduated high school in 2017, which was the year that Jakarta’s first Christian and ethnically Chinese-Indonesian governor in 50 years had been running for re-election. When hundreds of angry protesters carrying the flags of hardline Islamic groups demonstrated to pressure the Indonesian justice system to convict Ahok, Jakarta’s then governor, of blasphemy — that was really how we began to learn about what had happened in May 1998.
That political moment throughout 2016 and 2017 brought back the traumas of May 1998 for a lot of Chinese-Indonesians. Those riots in 1998 quickly turned into racist mobs ransacking Chinese-owned shops and houses, burning them down and leaving thousands dead. We knew that the riots were a traumatic part of our history, but we were never taught about what the violence and chaos were really about. It was only when we experienced the more recent political moment in 2016 that my friends and I were confronted with a lot of questions that forced us to investigate and examine what had actually happened in our own country back in 1998. The May 1998 riots happened the year before we were born, you know?
That’s fascinating to me. We tend to do that in Southeast Asia, don’t we? We tend to gloss over these sorts of histories. I think about what all the Chinese-Indonesians went through and … I don’t know. It’s rough.
Speaking of building the world of this story and the interiorities of our two main characters, Colin and Laela — Colin felt that the international school system is an extension of colonialism, asking, “Think about what makes an international school international in the first place.” On the other hand, Laela believed that international schools shape a very inclusive view of the world. How did growing up in international schools shape the way you tell stories as a filmmaker?
Look, the academics? Fantastic. The International Baccalaureate Program is an amazing approach to learning. The way that international school kids think about the world is very specific. We have a very broad view of the world. Absolutely. But we can’t just take it all at face value, you know?
I’m Swiss-Filipino. I didn’t have an American passport. Listen to how I talk [laughs]. My accent is so American. That’s an impact of the international school system – the ones with an American bend to it. It made it very difficult for me to want to go to a Swiss university. Same with a lot of friends of mine. We were being groomed for a collegiate life in the United States. If you think about what that means, it’s cultural colonialism. These schools influence the minds of young children to think with a Western perspective. It might not be an intentional, conscious goal of these international school curriculums, but it becomes inevitable.
These international students go to college in the United States and then they take what they learn back home. If you want to try to stay here in the U.S., it’s made to be very difficult. You can’t, really. They don’t want you to stay. They want you to spend your money at a university here and then they want you to leave. They’re like, thank you very much for your money. Bye now. And then, what do you do? Now you’re back at home, having been trained to have a Western perspective. If you run your own business, chances are you’re going to be more inclined to do business with American companies. If that’s not colonialism in the modern age, I don’t know what is.
It’s not sinister. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like this had been planned and mapped out since the 30s. It isn’t like that. But most things that aren’t intentionally sinister do end up being a little bit questionable in the end. It’s important to question these things. It’s important to call it out.
I loved the way I grew up. I loved the schools I went to, I loved the people I went to school with. But, let’s be honest about our realities.
Earlier, you were talking about how you were reconsidering the opening of This Time because of something that a white American critic had said. I find it interesting that these neo-colonial systems continue to affect the way that we think about our own stories.
Thanks for pointing that out. I need to process that. It’s a great observation. You’re right. So, I’m influenced mainly by European cinema and Asian cinema, not even like … actually, now I’m questioning my entire existence.
That’s what good cinema does.
I know. It’s a conundrum for me. After these festivals, I don’t really know where this film belongs. But isn’t that the story? Not knowing where something belongs?
I would love for this film to go to a streamer because that would give it the widest audience. Theatrical would be great too. This decision of whether or not to cut the footage, in the beginning, depends on whether or not I want to educate non-Indonesians or anyone who isn’t familiar with the May ‘98 Jakarta riots. But, you know, are Indonesians going to want to see my film? I don’t know. Are Americans going to want to see my film? Maybe. Hopefully. Europeans? I don’t know. Maybe. But I know for sure that it’s going to resonate with international school kids, with people who have traveled and moved around a lot. Maybe Gen Z will love it, like you guys do.
When we watch this film, we really do experience that conflict of not knowing where we belong alongside Colin and Laela. I wanted to point out how you brought the audience into their memories with them by having Colin and Laela play old home videos on a projector, with us seeing the projection set up on the wall right between their two heads. In that scene near the end of the film, we are watching them as they are watching their own memories.
As they watched the footage of these younger versions of themselves, Laela made a comment about how the people in those videos “aren’t really them anymore.” Colin hesitated as if he might not agree. Talk to me about how you shot that scene.
We shot four angles: a wide on the two of them, a wide from behind them, and the close-ups. What’s really cool is that I had always had in my mind that the projector would reflect off of the window behind them. What I didn’t realize is that we would get two additional reflections from the two side windows. That was a happy surprise. It became a triptych and we framed them within that triptych. We now had this visual where she had her screen, he had his screen, and then there was a shared screen between them in the middle.
Conceptually, this scene was a crucial point in the film because now we’ve stripped away everything. We’re literally just about to strip away everything –that’s what the love scene is about. This is the last of the lies, the walls that they have put up to guard themselves, and now we’re going to open it up and see what’s there. You are going to have to face your past. Colin’s whole thing is that he never wanted to look back. Laela’s whole thing is this belief that by looking back together, we might become closer. But that’s not what happens either. Looking back at the past actually pushes him away.
I wanted the audience to not just see their past, but to evaluate it. It’s not about the past. It’s about the complexities of how they are looking at it and dealing with it today. ♦