Kamila Andini is an Indonesian film director known for her critically acclaimed debut The Mirror Never Lies.
Biography
Andini was born on 6 May 1986, the eldest daughter of filmmaker Garin Nugroho. Although uninterested in cinematography for fear that she would be "work in her father's shadow", she began studying photography while still in junior high school, hoping to "capture people's life and behavior". While in senior high school her classmates often asked her father about filmmaking, questions which Andini later said "ashamed" her because she knew nothing of her father's oeuvre. She later began to become involved with several film committees. Andini completed a degree in sociology at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. Upon returning to Indonesia, Andini began to work as a director. She handled music videos for groups such as Ungu and Slank, as well as documentaries on music and the ocean. One of these, Lagu untuk Tukik, dealt with turtles in the ocean in the Wakatobi Regency – part of the Coral Triangle – and was screened as part of the Goethe Institute's Science Film Festival in 2012. In 2009 she assisted her father in directing Generasi Biru, about the band Slank. Andini began production of her first feature film, The Mirror Never Lies, in 2009. The work took over two years of research and two months of filming to complete, owing to a lack of documentary evidence on the Bajau who are central to the film's narrative. Co-produced by Andini's father and former Miss IndonesiaNadine Chandrawinata and starring Atiqah Hasiholan, Reza Rahadian, and Gita Novalista, the film followed a young Bajau girl who uses mirrors to try to find her lost father. It received numerous awards both domestically and internationally, including a Best Director nomination for Andini at the 2011 Indonesian Film Festival and a win in the same category at the following year's Bandung Film Festival. In March 2012 Andini married fellow director Ifa Isfansyah. His 2011 film Sang Penari had provided stiff competition to The Mirror Never Lies at the IFF. In May of that year she stated that she was working on her second feature film, to be about children and nature. This became The Seen and the Unseen, a critically praised work about young Balinese twins, one of whom is dying.
