Soul Break

By Pierce Vaughn

Palangka Raya is the capital city of central Kalimantan, a province on the island of Borneo, Indonesia. Borneo is best known for its immense biodiversity, housing one of the largest rain forests on the planet. The indigenous people on the island, known as Dayaks, are one of the original and most feared nomadic jungle tribes, most famous for their tradition of cutting off their rival’s heads i.e. headhunting. But all this has changed; now Borneo is sadly victim to massive deforestation and loss of culture.

Two years ago I came to Borneo with my brother to make films, and only recently stumbled across this little emerging group of Dayak b-boys, rappers and beat boxers.
Coming from a hip hop background myself, we immediately clicked and I started filming them. The lighting was terrible but I felt this had to be documented as it is amazing to see how the hip hop culture creeps into all cracks of the earth.

Every evening at 6 o'clock the Soul Break crew meets at the Mantikei stadium to practice their moves. Usually a group of girls are rehearsing as well. The place really comes alive with old school beats banging through bush mechanic style sound systems powered by cell phone batteries. The crew members go by names of; Smile, Monkey Man, Holy and others. Occasionally the local beat box crew 911 will drop by. Knowing quite a bit about beat boxing, I must say I was really impressed. It wasn’t too long until everyone was jamming, bringing in new styles like "Dangdut" which is (in my opinion) one of Indonesia’s worst but most popular music styles. Their beat box mix definitely went a long way to improving the genre though.

I decided to make a little clip for the Soul Break crew, something they could send around to each other’s phones and could use to represent outside the borders of Borneo.

I will continue visiting them… my gut feeling tells me there is another, bigger story to tell. I hope that through getting to know them better something might reveal itself, be it an idea for a music clip, a documentary or even a feature film. All I know is that meeting them was truly inspiring and took me back to my days of hip hop. We’ll see what comes of this adventure.

Borneo Productions International www.bpi-pt.com