Indonesian filmmaker Riar Rizaldi explores workplace accidents and ghost stories in this startling short about the horrors of international capitalism. Melding grotesque AI-imagery with droning shots of desolate docks and corporate offices, Notes from Gog Magog uses modern-day technology to indict the labor exploitation that produces it.

According to Rizaldi, Notes from Gog Magog came about when a friend of his told him “the story of a ghost living in a logistics ship.” He thought of the dock as a site of “unfinished business of the souls of people who die just because they’re doing labor,” and came up with the idea to make a film that connected a deadly accident at a freight harbour handling Samsung goods with a sinister portal to hell that opens up in the wee hours of the night at the company’s headquarters in Seoul. 

“I made this film as both an homage to the ghost stories I’ve always imagined as horror films in my head, and as a notebook film observing the circulation of material logistics. It is also a culture jam in response to workplace accident videos commonly shown by manufacturing companies in Indonesia—warnings not to lose a finger, a leg, or even a head—which, rather than ensuring safety, often function to manage workers’ fear so that when accidents happen, they are less likely to blame the company.” RIAR RIZALDI

Both blue-collar workers in Indonesia and white-collar workers in South Korea are all subject to the same overbearing evil of their corporate bosses in Rizaldi’s film, who continued to explore this pattern of profit-seeking malfeasance in follow-up films Magog (2022) and Larung (2024). His work, which folds social critique into horror cinema, sees him repeatedly tap into the soulless black box at the center of all transnational supply chains — as if he had direct access to contemporary capitalism’s nightmarish unconscious. 

Based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Riar Rizaldi is an artist interested in the relationship between capital and technology. His first short film Kasiterit premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2019, and was followed by a series of critically-acclaimed shorts and videos exploring political tensions in his native Indonesia. Rizaldi’s first feature film Monisme premiered at FIDMarseille in 2023 and his newest work, Fanfictie: Volcanology, just premiered at the Berlinale. This new film inaugurates a trilogy about the relationship between science and spirituality during the 18th and 19th centuries in Indonesia. 

Text written by Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer. Special thanks to Cici Peng.