Q&A: Faculty member’s film ‘Bitter Honey’ explores polygamy in Indonesia

With his experience as an anthropologist guiding him through the process, UCLA anthropology assistant adjunct professor Robert Lemelson set out to record seven years in the lives of three polygamous families in present-day Bali, Indonesia in his documentary, “Bitter Honey.”

Lemelson said after the regime of the second president of Indonesia, Suharto – which lasted from 1967 to 1998 – fell, the country was shook with a wave of sexual violence, he added.

When he traveled to Indonesia to investigate this sexual violence, Lemelson found that many of these victims were also participants in polygamous marriages, a legal practice under certain restrictions in Indonesia. He decided to shift his documentary in a new direction to tell these families’ stories.

Lemelson’s documentary screened at the Landmark Regent Theater in Los Angeles from Oct. 3-9, and is set to premiere in San Francisco this Friday, as well as for a limited time throughout respective independent theaters all over the country in the coming months.

The Daily Bruin’s Samantha Mannis sat down to talk with Lemelson, director of “Bitter Honey,” about the inspiration, challenges, success and story behind the film itself.

Daily Bruin: What story does your film, “Bitter Honey,” aim to tell?

Robert Lemelson: “Bitter Honey” is a story of three polygamist families in Bali, Indonesia, and it’s a story on multiple levels: love, deception, jealousy and a lot of the things that go along with the intimate and marital relations within these families. “Bitter Honey” shows how culture can sometimes dominate and structure people’s lives and why that is.

DB: What motivated you to make this film?

RL: I had been working for a number of years on both research and a film project on the 1965 and 1966 mass killings in Indonesia. At the end of the project, I was working with a number of my activist friends in Indonesia, and they all said I should really do a film not just about the beginning of the Suharto regime, but about the end.

DB: Being that “Bitter Honey” is a documentary, did events play out the way you expected?

RL: We approached it by letting the story tell itself. Even though I’ve worked in Indonesia, both in Bali and Java, and have encountered polygamy – it’s not uncommon – I did not know much about it. So, the first few years were spent learning about it and what life was like for these families – what their priorities were and significant features that shaped their experience. As time went on, then the stories became more and more clear of the way that culture intersects with their lives.

DB: What sorts of challenges do these women in “Bitter Honey” face?

RL: What happens is once the women get into a polygamist union, there are a lot of things they have to accept. They have to accept that their husbands will use violence to enforce their will, their husbands may take other wives against their will, their husbands generally do not financially support them and that their husbands are quite openly sexually promiscuous. In the film, we also explore issues of sexually transmitted diseases and the health implications of this.

DB: What was a challenge you came across while filming?

RL: When you start a project like this, the stories you get at the beginning tend not to be the actual stories. The first year we were shooting, we interviewed these women and their husbands, and everything was great and everyone got along. There were no conflicts, and I just knew that couldn’t be the real story. As we began to gain their trust and began to work with them and became collaborators in some ways on the project, the real aspects of their stories appeared.

Compiled by Samantha Mannis, A&E; contributor