Aryo Danusiri

Who is Aryo Danusiri?

Aryo Danusiri is an Indonesian film director.

He started his first documentary, Village Goat Takes The Beating, about Aceh human rights violations, in 1999. This documentary was an official selection at the 2001 Amnesty Film Festival in Amsterdam. Since then, his ethnographic films, documentaries and short films about human rights and multicultural problems in Indonesia have been screened at various festivals including the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival in the United Kingdom, the Margaret Mead Film Festival in the United States, as well as festivals in Singapore, Brisbane, Taiwan and Rotterdam. His three documentaries on Aceh have been released on DVD for international distribution by Monash University.

In 2005, he finished his master's degree in visual cultural studies from Tromso University, Norway, with an ethno-documentary about West Papua called Lukas' Moment. This film received the "Best Student Film" award at the RAI Ethnographic Film Festival, UK. He began his Ph.D. studies in visual anthropology at Harvard University with a grant from the Fulbright Program. Playing Between Elephants is his first feature length documentary and won the Human Rights Award at the 2007 Jakarta International Film Festival.