The year 2016 will go down in infamy for a number of reasons, but let’s not forget that a lot of good things happened this year too – things that warmed our hearts, uplifted our spirits or just made us laugh our butts off (which is also good for the soul). Fortunately, many of those moments were caught on video for our collective viewing pleasure.
Here we’ve rounded up our favorite videos that we’ve shared with you this year (and yes, some of them are not actually from 2016 but we’ve included them anyways because it’s our list and we can do whatever we please even if it’s not totally conceptually consistent). Enjoy!
Musical Greatness
1. One of our proudest moments of the year was watching then 12-year-old Indonesian jazz piano prodigy Joey Alexander earning a standing ovation for his performance at the Grammy awards.
2. A lot of people were excited about Coldplay coming to Asia this year, but we think this Javanese gamelan version of “A Sky Full of Stars” is better than the original. The musician who made it, GamelAwan (real name Kholis Kurniawan) has produced tons of other amazing gamelan covers of Western pop songs.
3. This awe-inspiring performance helped the Resonanz Children’s Choir (TRCC), one of Indonesia’s most amazingly talented musical groups, win the Grand Prix award at the prestigious Claudio Monteverdi Choral Festival and Competition in July.
4-5. We’re including two music videos from 17-year-old Jakartan Brian Imanuel aka Rich Chigga on this list -“Dat $tick” the legit viral hit (30 million views on Youtube and counting) that launched him to global fame and the insane video for the remix he did with the legendary Ghostface Killah of the Wu-Tang Clan.
Love Letters to the Capital
6. “Surat untuk Jakarta” is a beautiful award-winning short which doesn’t tell a story so much as evoke the feelings of living in Jakarta through gorgeous minimalist animation.
7. But that wasn’t the only brilliant love letter to Jakarta this year – this gorgeous video by Youtuber SoSonia may be titled “How to Survive Jakarta” but it’s also a beautiful meditation on what makes the Indonesian capital such a special place.
History and culture
8. This brilliant video from the always fascinating Langfocus channel provides a fascinating account of the historical originals of Bahasa Indonesia and examines the linguistic nuances of Indonesian slang (bahasa gaul).
9. This rare color film about life in the “Dutch East Indies” from 1938-1939 provides an amazing glimpse into what life in Indonesia was like during the end of the colonial era.
10. In a similar vein, people loved this recently re-released 1971 Canadian-produced documentary about Jakarta for showing how different things were back then (and how some things remain the same).
11. We also really loved this touching mini-documentary about people with Indonesian roots living in the Netherlands.
Battling hate with love
12. This heartwarming story of a Muslim girl staying with a Christian family will indeed restore your faith in humanity. It’s also an important lesson to think about how we can fight the rising tide of religious intolerance in Indonesia.
13-14. Dissa Ahdanisa founded the Fingertalk Cafe in South Tangerang to not only give the hearing impaired more work opportunities but also to teach Indonesian about sign language and deaf culture.
Her incredible work was recognized by none other than US President Barack Obama, who praised Dissa as an inspirational example while addressing a Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative (YSEALI) Town Hall meeting in Laos this year (he starts talking about Dissa at the 11 minute mark).
15. Angry mobs attacked several Buddhist temples in Tanjung Balai, North Sumatra, in late July, supposedly after being angered by news that a local woman of Chinese descendent had complaining about a mosque’s loudspeaker. It was another ugly incident of religious intolerance in Indonesia in a year filled with them. But this video of Muslim students helping to repair the temples after the attacks was just what we needed to watch to restore our faith in Pancasila.
16. This video of police in Sragen, Central Java, steadfastly refusing to let members of the Islamic Defenders Front enter a supermarket to sweep for ‘Christmas attributes’ was an early gift for people in Indonesia happy to see law enforcers standing up to hardliners.
Lucu Banget
17. Of course, we couldn’t forget to include this video of Sidney, the magnificient motorcycle-driving dog of Manado.
18. This hilarious video turns the dining table on all those videos showing westerners taste testing “weird, exotic” Asian foods to show that European foods can seem pretty damn weird too if you’ve never tried them.
19. Chef and Youtube star Ben Sumadiwiria’s near-literal meltdown after eating the “spiciest noodles in the world” at Jakarta’s infamous Warung Abang Adek was definitely one of the funniest food moments of the year.
20. But of course, this is the funniest thing that happened all year in Jakarta (unless you’re the guy who got arrested for doing it – he probably don’t think it’s that funny anymore).
