Still, he says that he would not change a withering word – he was only giving an honest opinion. He also knows what it is like to experience the sting of a harsh review or two.

“I’m OK with it if people say something. Maybe for one or two hours, I feel hurt if they say my movie sucks. But to hold a grudge or take it personally against people who criticize your movies – I think it’s childish. You’re an artist, and it’s for the public to judge.”

It’s a long way from a teeming Medan kampong to making movies in Jakarta, a tough journey that took talent, determination and resolve, as well as a bit of good fortune. It is a story that is the stuff of movies, the hard-luck, almost incredible tale of a lonely little boy who set his mind to achieving his dreams.

Fate may have something to do with success, but self-belief also is a big part of the formula. If others doubted Joko’s talent, it seems that he was firmly convinced that, whatever it took, he would reach his goal. “I always finish what I start,” he says.

Joko was born in the North Sumatra capital to a Javanese father, who moved away from his hometown after a string of family tragedies. He was a becak driver; Joko’s mother had been married three times before.

They were a poor family and it was tough to make ends meet: When there was no rice in the house, they would go next door and “borrow” some from their neighbors. It was a crowded cluster of humanity where everybody kept a watchful eye on those around them.

“Something happened when I was small – my mother would go away for three or four days at a time. Well, we lived in a kampong, and everybody hated us, people started to gossip about us, about prostitution and stuff.”

He said other children would gather outside his home – “they looked like a choir standing there” – chanting “whore’s kid” when he went outside.

His only escape was the local movie theater, called the Remaja. Here he could pay Rp 100 for a Sunday showing of cinematic also-rans, from local occult films to low-budget slasher flicks from the U.S. and Europe.

As he got older, he would come home from watching a movie and rewrite it in his own words. The dog-eared notebooks, he said, are stacked somewhere in Medan. The films and their characters gave him an education in life, he adds.

He first dreamed of being an actor, but his brother told him he was not sufficiently good looking to be in front of the camera. “My mother kind of confirmed it for me by saying that I wasn’t bad looking either,” he jokes. Poverty, loneliness, social ostracism: It has all the makings of a three-hankie tear-jerker.

“But it’s not sad. I never thought my childhood was bad. I thought I had a lovely childhood. Even now, if I look back, all the pain and everything, it’s nice, it’s poetic.”

Most of his peers were in trouble by the time they were teenagers, he said.

Joko did his own thing, studying hard, watching videos whenever he could, writing plays and persuading his parents to let him become an exchange student to the United States.

Again, determination and some luck saved the day: Although his family only had a portion of the administration fee for the program, he was fortunate to be selected for a scholarship.

He had been a play-it-by-the-rules teen, a boy scout and die-hard supporter of president Soeharto (he was chosen to represent North Sumatra in the prestigious Paskibraka national flag-raising corps for Independence Day).

The trip to the U.S. was a revelation, with the myths of New Order Indonesia exposed as he pored over articles in the local library.

He returned to study aeronautics at the Bandung Institute of Technology. It seems like a strange choice, but it was one made out of necessity, because his family did not have the funds for him to enroll at the Jakarta Arts Institute.

Although Joko continued to devour movies at every opportunity, he balked at the entry requirements for the campus movie enthusiasts club (someone somewhere must be kicking themselves). He finished college and was accepted at the Post, another stepping stone in his plan to become a filmmaker.

“I thought that if I became a journalist, I could find a way to be an entertainment reporter and meet filmmakers, and then BS my way into the industry.”

Instead, he was stuck on the new reporter’s beats of the city and national police headquarters. Frustrated by the routine, he went freelance after 10 months, starting his regular Now Showing/Still Playing columns and occasionally contributing profiles about members of the film community.

As chance would have it, he was assigned to profile Nia DiNata, who was promoting her period love story Cabaukan.

“She asked me if I had seen the movie, and I BS-ed her. I said there were script problems, so she asked me how I could say that. And I said, well, I am a scriptwriter myself.”

Nia remembers her first impression of Joko a bit differently.

“I had done so many interviews, but unlike other reporters, he was so casual, he was not rude, not stiff, there was no BS,” the producerdirector said. “He didn’t do it like an interview, but a discussion of books and film, and then I interviewed him!”

She asked to see a few pages of his script for what would become Janji Joni, and was impressed enough to ask him to join her. She told him he would have to earn his dues on set as an assistant before graduating to the big time of directing.

Then came Arisan!, a movie that would change both their lives. Nia wanted to do a humorous social satire of Jakarta’s ladies who lunch, meeting to compare brand-named totes and exchange gossip. Mixed in with the frivolity was the more serious subplot of a romance between Sakti (Tora Sudiro), a young man struggling to accept that he is gay, and Nino (Surya Saputra), who is already out of the closet.

She enlisted Joko to help her write the script, which was fleshed out over early morning breakfasts and at cafes late into the night.

Funny, engaging and touching, the film was critically acclaimed, winning the 2004 Indonesian Film Festival award for Best Picture. But it was the gay theme – and a rather chaste kiss between the two male leads – that whipped up a media commotion.

Although gay characters were not new to Indonesian film, they were usually stereotyped as pathetic deviants who eventually realize the error of their ways, or the mincing butt of the joke.

“Sakti is a rather wretched character, and maybe other screenwriters would have made him melancholic,” says film critic Leila S. Chudori from Tempo newsmagazine. “But although it was sad at the beginning, the story becomes

funny, without having the audience laugh at the expense of gay people.”

The story is a very personal one for Joko, who has long been out to close friends.

“I always picture myself in that movie as a bit of Nino and Sakti. The relationship of Sakti and his mother is like my mother and me, or my fantasy of how I would like it to be… Why Nino? Because in every relationship I have been convinced that this is OK.”

He is the first to admit it was not a perfect movie, and when he watches it today he only sees the mistakes.

“But I’m not embarrassed by them. I think it was a very good entry for me. It was like making a statement – I make movies because I love movies –but I know how valuable movies are to people.”

Part of the deal for writing Arisan! with Nia was that Joko would get to make Janji Joni, which he had finished after leaving the Post. He was given full artistic freedom on the film, completed on a whirlwind schedule that required keeping one step ahead of the authorities for many of the location shots.

It also was well-received, and was selected the winner of the MTV Indonesia Best Film honor (he admits the combative movie-goer played by Surya Saputra, ready to fight to watch his movie in peace and quiet, is based on his own demands).

Curiously, he does not recall what it was like to see the words Director:

Joko Anwar on the big screen for the first time. More pleasing to him was the casting of his childhood screen hero, action star Barry Prima, now a bit thinner on top and thicker around the middle, as the taxi driver.

“I called him up and told him about the movie, and also what I knew about his films, and it was great that he agreed to do it. That meant a lot.”

The eyes-down laptop crowd is shaken by Joko’s booming “hello” heralding his entry into a South Jakarta coffee shop.

Last time we met, a couple of days after wrapping  Kala, he made the most of the menu, sampling soup, a sandwich, a slice of cheesecake and reaching over for a forkful of my mushroom pie. This time, he is on a strict diet, nursing a solitary strawberry-kiwi Snapple for the duration of our conversation.

He wears black – usually a T-shirt and jeans– but it’s not because he wants to give a calculated Bohemian impression through wafts of cigarette smoke.

It’s simply more practical.

The burly filmmaker is known as a bit of a cut-up, with a fair dose of that Jim Carrey type of zaniness and irreverence about him. That can help when dealing with his critics, such as at this year’s premier of Jakarta Undercover, which he terms a “popcorn movie”.

“Someone came up to me after it was screened and said, ‘the movie has no weight’. And I responded, ‘Well, not every movie has to be as heavy as my body’.”

He is dismissive of “overintellectualizing” about movies; after all his cinematic points of reference were not Bergman, Eisenstein or even Teguh Karya and Syumanjaya. His favorite film is 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love, with Adam Sandler, in a more serious role than usual, as a nerd who is empowered by his love of a young woman.

Joko talks about the “polarization” in Indonesian film today, between the arthouse movies that the public does not want to see, and commercially viable but crass vehicles that “nobody should be proud of”.

“I want to make movies to provide an impact to my viewers. Now so many filmmakers say, ‘what theme should I make a movie about?’ To me, that’s stupid. When a story comes into your head when you are walking along, then do it -- tell the people the story.” He is frank in his opinions, as his friends and colleagues attest. The week before he had named one of the country’smost acclaimed directors as someone he respected for his artistic consistency. Today, Joko tells me to scratch that comment; he was disappointed by the man’s reaction after members of the film community decided to return their Citra awards to protest stifling restrictions on Indonesian film.

Joko, along with Mira Lesmana and others, was prominent among the group of protesters.

If his gamble with Kala works, he will fortify his reputation among the new generation of Indonesian filmmakers. Some who have read the script describe it as an original, ground-breaking piece with a stunning twist in its ending.

“Joko is someone who is very sensitive to urban problems, their complexity, not only about people but how living in a city affects them, both externally in their actions and internally,” said Leila.

“We take the things around us for granted – the traffic jams, etc. – but he records them and makes a story about them. He is a storyteller who can also make movies, and not every director is able to do that.”

Nia, the woman who gave him his start, is unstinting in her praise for her former partner as a person and a filmmaker.

“There has always been an honesty and gullibility about Joko, and he can stay that way. He can get everything he wants easily, and I don’t think anybody else has that talent, the balance of great talent and kindness,” she said.

“But perhaps he must try to understand the wickedness and cruelty of human beings more [to grow as a filmmaker]. He will say, ‘I don’t want to know about that’ …”

Joko says he is even more confident about Kala than when Janji Joni was released. It promises to occupy a big chunk of his time this year, and will wait and see what to do next. He has about four other screenplays that he has written that he would like to make by himself.

“I want to inspire with my movies. It’s as simple as that.