Filastine "Colony Collapse"

Great music and video with a real message. All sites in Indonesia.

 Music: Filastine (with Nova)
Director/DOP/Editor: Astu Prasidya (aka Tooliq)
Production and Concept: Grey Filastine &
Nova Funded: by a crowd

Colony Collapse is filmed at sites of ecological friction, the fault lines of conflict between humanity and (the rest of) nature. It is a video made to confront and indict the ongoing catastrophes that are the very fabric of our globalized economic order. For examples we used....

Lapindo (Sidoarjo) Mud Disaster is an eruption of scalding mud and flammable vapors triggered by a gas drilling gone awry. It has buried more than a dozen villages and blocked a major highway, and is expected to keep expanding for the next 25 years. Lapindo is located close to the home town of the the director (Tooliq) and singer (Nova).

Below a freshly shattered dam on the shoulder of Merapi mountain. This required a meeting with an important Islamic mountain shaman, who wanted to know we weren't up to anything frivolous or disrespectful. After the vetting he sent his crew to guide and protect us, some men went upriver a few kilometers to warn us by mobile phone if a new flood was coming down.

Bantar Gebang is a landscape of trash. Garbage stretches farther than the eye can see. Mountains, rivers, and even villages where the trash-pickers live. Not something easy to summarize in words.

A supermarket nested in a mega-mall within a skyscraper. Air conditioning, shopping carts, muzak, just like any posh supermarket. But right outside is a the permanent traffic jam of Jakarta, a sprawling mega-city of at least 10 million.
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All that you can see
beneath the sun
what is made by humans
now must be undone

landscape of confusion
leaving one and all
vying against the other
welcome to our fall

(this section sung in very old javanese poetic style, not many lyrics, but what few are saying essentially says not respect for nature, not to turn our backs on our origins, or there will be consequences)

Capos of financial scams
discount offer flat-rate plan
stuck again in traffic jams
with double meaning i say damn

damn Lapindo* damn the oil
damn the gas that's burned the soil
water, air, and land are damned
now behold the works of man

allah o akbar what they say
from loudspeakers every day
i get down on knees to pray
or the sons of god might go away

(verse in bahasa)

rapping politics is uncool
but just a sec it's almost through
it's downer than the oldest school
cheap boombox more broke than rules

Gamelan and on and on
while complaining about what's wrong
the time has passed & now it's gone
it's about time to end this song

All that you can see
beneath the sun
what is made by humans
now must be undone

landscape of confusion
leaving one and all
vying against the other
welcome to our fall