he saw. It was just at this time that a popular uprising forced Indonesian dictator Suharto from power, an event that resonated far beyond the region, in part because Indonesia has the world's fourth-largest population. Helmrich kept filming. "I just went to everything that was interesting. There were so many things in politics happening, so I was following it. But also when I was just sitting there waiting for a moment, I saw insects crawling on the ground, I'd see cats interacting with each other, so I just started filming them. DV tape was so cheap, so I thought - why not shoot it?" He ended up with an insane 300 hours of footage, from which he somehow mined the brilliant 90 minutes that make up The Eye of the Day . While editing that film, he noticed that the 'thin red line' of narrative interest was the story of Rumidjah Sjamsuddin, an elderly woman he met and befriended in his mother's village, along with her two sons, Bakti and Dwi, and their families. So they became his de facto subjects in the editing room; when the film was widely acclaimed and he won a grant to make another film, having already earned their trust he returned to film them again. Thus a documentary epic was born. "It took time to build that trust for them," he says. "But on the other hand, I've also noticed, it's all up to yourself." Helmrich credits his unobtrusive filmmaking technique with allowing for