Hi everyone, I plan to apply to Erasmus Mundus+ GLOCAL this year and trying to get any feedback on my motivation letter's draft. Here's my draft:
I am a researcher and filmmaker whose work examines how media and popular culture construct social realities and mediate power in stratified societies. Growing up, I primarily consumed Western popular culture widely circulated through Indonesia's mainstream media, such as The Harry Potter Series and The Chronicles of Narnia. Herbert Schiller's theory of cultural imperialism (1989, 1992) elucidates how Western cultural production has become transnationalised and naturalised as universal. At the time, I internalised those narratives as frameworks for my adolescent self-discovery, without recognising the asymmetrical power relations and Western hegemonic structures embedded within both the stories and their modes of distribution. While the acceleration of digital media later enabled access to a broader range of non-Western narratives, developing countries such as Indonesia have continued to adopt models and practices derived from the United States within their creative industries. This persistence demonstrates that cultural imperialism has not diminished but has instead been reinforced across multiple cultural sectors (Zhang, 2016).
Having graduated with a bachelor's degree majoring in Social Anthropology from the University of Indonesia, my work has focused on developing narratives that translate ethnographic research and local knowledge into accessible audio-visual forms. My academic background equips me with a critical analytical lens that was further consolidated during my undergraduate studies, where I was exposed to interdisciplinary perspectives on media, culture, and power relations. Mentorship from respected professors in the Anthropology Department, alongside a cross-major course in media studies, enabled me to engage rigorously with theories of representation, knowledge production, and participatory practice. Crucially, this academic environment also encouraged the translation of theory into practice. One formative experience was my involvement in a collaborative music and documentary project with Oromo refugees from Ethiopia, musicians, and the academic community. This project culminated in presentations at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London and the University of Amsterdam, demonstrating the possibilities of collaborative media practice.
Following graduation, my desire to deepen hands-on engagement with filmmaking led me to pursue professional training in film production through producer and scriptwriter workshops organised by the Mondiblanc Film Workshop Foundation. Over time, this involvement evolved into a sustained institutional role on the foundation's board of management and a mentor role in the scriptwriting programme. In my dual role as a researcher and producer, I employ participatory methods to co-create empirically grounded narratives with marginalised communities, including refugees from Ethiopia and Afghanistan; displaced women due to land grabbing and resource exploitation in North Sumatra and Central Borneo; nomadic Punan people in North Kalimantan negotiating modernisation by reviving their customs and cultural heritage; and suburban male youth negotiating inherited forms of masculinity in digital media landscape. My commitment to amplifying marginalised voices also stems from my personal experience as a Minangkabau woman who has never fully aligned with prescribed cultural expectations and who has contested patriarchal norms within a matrilineal kinship system. This dissonance has heightened my sensitivity to exclusion and continues to inform my work.
Concurrently, my professional experiences across fiction and documentary projects in Indonesia have sharpened my critical analysis of structural constraints within the film industry. It helped me recognise that the creative industries are driven not merely by macroeconomic figures, but by complex cultural dynamics and power structures. On the surface, Indonesia's post-pandemic film industry has achieved remarkable growth, with cinema audiences exceeding 82 million in 2024 and local films commanding a dominant 62% share of the domestic market by 2025. While this expansion signals massive economic momentum and a growing influence on the public imagination, it masks deep structural vulnerabilities. In a saturated market with limited screens and algorithm-driven consumption habits, local production houses increasingly rely on familiar intellectual properties and derivative narrative formulas to secure distribution. The local industry's attempt to compete in a Hollywood-centric market; therefore, more than 100 titles are produced annually, with a heavy emphasis on the horror or horror-comedy genre.
Through my engagement as a narrative researcher with several mid-tier production houses, I witnessed firsthand the institutional asymmetry within this booming market. While major production houses possess the capital to flood screens with biweekly or monthly releases, independent and mid-tier studios that prioritize meticulous research and development in the pre-production phase are constrained to releasing only one or two titles a year. Consequently, the local film industry creates a highly precarious environment for mid-tier companies, independent filmmakers, and the labour infrastructure. As I became intrigued with media and cultural studies, I began questioning the long-term sustainability of this model, recognising that a truly resilient creative economy cannot rely solely on high-volume output; it must actively foster an equitable ecosystem that protects labour infrastructure and supports a healthy spectatorship culture to prevent creative burnout.
These inquiries shape my commitment to institutional change in the film industry, motivating me to pursue the GLOCAL programme, specifically Track E: Institutional Change and Creative Industries, to transition from a localized practitioner to a global cultural strategist by seeking theoretical and comparative knowledge at an international level. In my first year at the University of Glasgow, the course Labour and the Global Economy will allow me to contextualize the structural precarity and gender inequalities faced by Indonesian creative workers against the competitive pressures of the integrated global market. Concurrently, Global Varieties of Capitalism will provide the theoretical toolkits to analyze the institutional differences between coordinated and liberal economies, helping me understand how market structures influence innovation. At Uppsala Universitet, the course Sustainability of Welfare Policies in the Modern Era is vital to my trajectory; by analyzing the evolution of Nordic welfare states and their models of economic security, I will gain the insights necessary to design institutional frameworks that safeguard independent sectors. Ultimately, at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Creative Industries in the Global Economy will allow me to critically examine how digitalization has altered industry dynamics and monetization, and how individual creative clusters redesign themselves to survive asymmetry. Collectively, these courses will directly inform my long-term career goal: to establish a research-driven cultural institute in Southeast Asia that advises regional policymakers on building an equitable, resilient, and non-exploitative film ecosystem.
Ultimately, I view film not merely as a commercial commodity, but as a cultural artifact. When Hollywood formulas dominate the local film industry, what is at stake is not just the economy, but the nation's identity and socio-cultural representation. I view this phenomenon not simply as a matter of market competition, but as a direct threat to the film ecosystem's sustainability and the rights of creative workers. Through GLOCAL Track E, I aim to deepen my understanding of how institutional interventions and economic frameworks-specifically through the lenses of Welfare Policies at Uppsala and Global History and Creative Industries at Rotterdam-can be engineered to safeguard local cultural ecosystems against exploitation by global markets. Upon completing the programme, I plan to return to the Mondiblanc Film Workshop Foundation, leveraging my position on the board of management to transform the foundation into an active incubator for structural advocacy. By applying the comparative knowledge learned abroad, I will facilitate cross-sectoral dialogue and foster cooperation among academia, creative workers, and policymakers to dismantle the invisible vulnerability of creative workers and build an equitable local film ecosystem.
I am a researcher and filmmaker whose work examines how media and popular culture construct social realities and mediate power in stratified societies. Growing up, I primarily consumed Western popular culture widely circulated through Indonesia's mainstream media, such as The Harry Potter Series and The Chronicles of Narnia. Herbert Schiller's theory of cultural imperialism (1989, 1992) elucidates how Western cultural production has become transnationalised and naturalised as universal. At the time, I internalised those narratives as frameworks for my adolescent self-discovery, without recognising the asymmetrical power relations and Western hegemonic structures embedded within both the stories and their modes of distribution. While the acceleration of digital media later enabled access to a broader range of non-Western narratives, developing countries such as Indonesia have continued to adopt models and practices derived from the United States within their creative industries. This persistence demonstrates that cultural imperialism has not diminished but has instead been reinforced across multiple cultural sectors (Zhang, 2016).
Having graduated with a bachelor's degree majoring in Social Anthropology from the University of Indonesia, my work has focused on developing narratives that translate ethnographic research and local knowledge into accessible audio-visual forms. My academic background equips me with a critical analytical lens that was further consolidated during my undergraduate studies, where I was exposed to interdisciplinary perspectives on media, culture, and power relations. Mentorship from respected professors in the Anthropology Department, alongside a cross-major course in media studies, enabled me to engage rigorously with theories of representation, knowledge production, and participatory practice. Crucially, this academic environment also encouraged the translation of theory into practice. One formative experience was my involvement in a collaborative music and documentary project with Oromo refugees from Ethiopia, musicians, and the academic community. This project culminated in presentations at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London and the University of Amsterdam, demonstrating the possibilities of collaborative media practice.
Following graduation, my desire to deepen hands-on engagement with filmmaking led me to pursue professional training in film production through producer and scriptwriter workshops organised by the Mondiblanc Film Workshop Foundation. Over time, this involvement evolved into a sustained institutional role on the foundation's board of management and a mentor role in the scriptwriting programme. In my dual role as a researcher and producer, I employ participatory methods to co-create empirically grounded narratives with marginalised communities, including refugees from Ethiopia and Afghanistan; displaced women due to land grabbing and resource exploitation in North Sumatra and Central Borneo; nomadic Punan people in North Kalimantan negotiating modernisation by reviving their customs and cultural heritage; and suburban male youth negotiating inherited forms of masculinity in digital media landscape. My commitment to amplifying marginalised voices also stems from my personal experience as a Minangkabau woman who has never fully aligned with prescribed cultural expectations and who has contested patriarchal norms within a matrilineal kinship system. This dissonance has heightened my sensitivity to exclusion and continues to inform my work.
Concurrently, my professional experiences across fiction and documentary projects in Indonesia have sharpened my critical analysis of structural constraints within the film industry. It helped me recognise that the creative industries are driven not merely by macroeconomic figures, but by complex cultural dynamics and power structures. On the surface, Indonesia's post-pandemic film industry has achieved remarkable growth, with cinema audiences exceeding 82 million in 2024 and local films commanding a dominant 62% share of the domestic market by 2025. While this expansion signals massive economic momentum and a growing influence on the public imagination, it masks deep structural vulnerabilities. In a saturated market with limited screens and algorithm-driven consumption habits, local production houses increasingly rely on familiar intellectual properties and derivative narrative formulas to secure distribution. The local industry's attempt to compete in a Hollywood-centric market; therefore, more than 100 titles are produced annually, with a heavy emphasis on the horror or horror-comedy genre.
Through my engagement as a narrative researcher with several mid-tier production houses, I witnessed firsthand the institutional asymmetry within this booming market. While major production houses possess the capital to flood screens with biweekly or monthly releases, independent and mid-tier studios that prioritize meticulous research and development in the pre-production phase are constrained to releasing only one or two titles a year. Consequently, the local film industry creates a highly precarious environment for mid-tier companies, independent filmmakers, and the labour infrastructure. As I became intrigued with media and cultural studies, I began questioning the long-term sustainability of this model, recognising that a truly resilient creative economy cannot rely solely on high-volume output; it must actively foster an equitable ecosystem that protects labour infrastructure and supports a healthy spectatorship culture to prevent creative burnout.
These inquiries shape my commitment to institutional change in the film industry, motivating me to pursue the GLOCAL programme, specifically Track E: Institutional Change and Creative Industries, to transition from a localized practitioner to a global cultural strategist by seeking theoretical and comparative knowledge at an international level. In my first year at the University of Glasgow, the course Labour and the Global Economy will allow me to contextualize the structural precarity and gender inequalities faced by Indonesian creative workers against the competitive pressures of the integrated global market. Concurrently, Global Varieties of Capitalism will provide the theoretical toolkits to analyze the institutional differences between coordinated and liberal economies, helping me understand how market structures influence innovation. At Uppsala Universitet, the course Sustainability of Welfare Policies in the Modern Era is vital to my trajectory; by analyzing the evolution of Nordic welfare states and their models of economic security, I will gain the insights necessary to design institutional frameworks that safeguard independent sectors. Ultimately, at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Creative Industries in the Global Economy will allow me to critically examine how digitalization has altered industry dynamics and monetization, and how individual creative clusters redesign themselves to survive asymmetry. Collectively, these courses will directly inform my long-term career goal: to establish a research-driven cultural institute in Southeast Asia that advises regional policymakers on building an equitable, resilient, and non-exploitative film ecosystem.
Ultimately, I view film not merely as a commercial commodity, but as a cultural artifact. When Hollywood formulas dominate the local film industry, what is at stake is not just the economy, but the nation's identity and socio-cultural representation. I view this phenomenon not simply as a matter of market competition, but as a direct threat to the film ecosystem's sustainability and the rights of creative workers. Through GLOCAL Track E, I aim to deepen my understanding of how institutional interventions and economic frameworks-specifically through the lenses of Welfare Policies at Uppsala and Global History and Creative Industries at Rotterdam-can be engineered to safeguard local cultural ecosystems against exploitation by global markets. Upon completing the programme, I plan to return to the Mondiblanc Film Workshop Foundation, leveraging my position on the board of management to transform the foundation into an active incubator for structural advocacy. By applying the comparative knowledge learned abroad, I will facilitate cross-sectoral dialogue and foster cooperation among academia, creative workers, and policymakers to dismantle the invisible vulnerability of creative workers and build an equitable local film ecosystem.
