Kamila Andini

Andini was born on 6 May 1986, the eldest daughter of filmmaker Garin Nugroho.[1] Although uninterested in cinematography for fear that she would be "work[ing] in her father's shadow",[2] she began studying photography while still in junior high school, hoping to "capture people's life and behavior".[1] While in senior high school her classmates often asked her father about filmmaking, questions which Andini later said "ashamed" her because she knew nothing of her father's oeuvre.[1] She later began to become involved with several film committees. Andini completed a degree in sociology at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.[1]

Upon returning to Indonesia, Andini began to work as a director. She handled music videos for groups such as Ungu and Slank, as well as documentaries on music and the ocean.[1] One of these, Lagu untuk Tukik (A Song for Tukik), dealt with turtles in the ocean in the Wakatobi Regency – part of the Coral Triangle – and was screened as part of the Goethe Institute's Science Film Festival in 2012.[3] In 2009 she assisted her father in directing Generasi Biru (The Blue Generation), about the band Slank.[4]

Andini began production of her first feature film, The Mirror Never Lies, in 2009. The work took over two years of research[1] and two months of filming to complete,[5] owing to a lack of documentary evidence on the Bajau who are central to the film's narrative.[1] Co-produced by Andini's father and former Miss Indonesia Nadine Chandrawinata and starring Atiqah Hasiholan, Reza Rahadian, and Gita Novalista, the film followed a young Bajau girl who uses mirrors to try to find her lost father.[6] It received numerous awards both domestically and internationally, including a Best Director nomination for Andini at the 2011 Indonesian Film Festival (IFF) and a win in the same category at the following year's Bandung Film Festival.[7]

In May 2012 she started working on her second feature film, to be about children and nature.[8] This became The Seen and the Unseen (2017), a critically acclaimed work about young Balinese twins, one of whom is dying.[9] It won the Adelaide Film Festival's Feature Fiction Award in 2019.[10]

In March 2012 Andini married fellow director Ifa Isfansyah.[11] His 2011 film Sang Penari (The Dancer) had provided stiff competition to The Mirror Never Lies at the IFF.[12]