The Friends of the Gamelan invite you to a screening of the documentary film Goong: Sound through Fire, with an audience Q&A immediately following with the film's director Maria Mendonça.

Sukoharjo in Central Java is one of the few remaining centres of bronze gong forging in Indonesia. The documentary film, Goong: Sound through Fire, follows the creation of a large Sundanese gong (goong) in Sutarno's forge in Jatiteken, Sukoharjo. The film takes an immersive, multi-sensory approach to the process, guided by the occasional interjections of Sutarno. The rich, multi-layered soundscape of the forge and the ever-shifting colours and intensities of the fire accompany the smashing and melting of the copper and tin; the rhythmic hammering, shaping and firing of the emerging, red-hot bronze disc by a team of craftsmen; the voicing of the forged instrument; and finally the sounding of the goong by the master gong-maker.

To watch the trailer for Goong: Sound through Fire, visit https://filmfreeway.com/GoongSoundThroughFire

About the director: Maria Mendonça is an ethnomusicologist and filmmaker who teaches in the Anthropology and Music departments at Kenyon College, OH. Her first film, Gamelan Encounters (2017), explored the questions of how and why music travels across cultures, focused on four people's stories of encountering Javanese gamelan orchestra performance in Britain. She is part of the editorial team of JAVEM, the online Journal of Audiovisual Ethnomusicology published by the Society for Ethnomusicology, and has been a committee member for the Ethnomusicology Film Award at the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival (2021).