Last week was a good week for the movies. But as is the way with all movies, you come out wondering what, exactly, it is you've seen.

We went to two sessions of the Indonesian Film Festival. Cool venue -- ACMI's very suave theatres. And a nice atmosphere, with goody-bags and give-aways.

The Tuesday session (at which we arrived soaked after one of those irritatingly sudden Melbourne downpours) was an evening of shorts. If you discount the first (a superficial "gotcha" story), the rest were thoughtful snapshots of three current problems in Indonesia: the plight of those displaced by the Lapindo mud flow; the trauma of falling in love with someone from a different ethnic/religious background; and the environmental challenges facing poor fishing communities in northern Jakarta.

The Thursday session screened Di Bawah Pohon (Under the Tree). The blurb said:

"It is a story which follows the lives of three women, each struggling with their own individual predicament, as they make their journey to visit the sacred island of Bali in order to find the meaning of peace through the unexpected experience of magical realism."

I enjoyed it (even if I didn't understand it all -- were the women baby-trafficking? why precisely did the rich kid fixate on the old man?), but in the back of my mind was the feeling that I was somehow being fed a stereotype. Balinese people are all artists, right? They live and breathe their dance; they express their joys and sorrows in their song; they work out every trauma through a cultural experience. Maybe they do. I just wonder... Are we encountering only what we EXPECT to find in Bali -- something beautiful, mysterious, cathartic, ancient -- and getting no closer to what it's really all about?

Then on Saturday, we went to see Boy. Set in East Coast New Zealand in the early 1980s, it's thoroughly enjoyable. One of those movies that makes you want to laugh and cry, both at the same time. A clever exploration of how a kid reconciles the fantasy he has created of his father with the real, fairly deadbeat father who turns up one day on the doorstep. Just like those docos that look at kids growing up -- charting them at seven, then at fourteen, and so on -- this is a movie that invites you to remember that it's tough being a human, living not only with the choices you've made but also with the crap that fate has dealt you, both in your lifetime and before. But the invitation is framed in lots of laughter, and on the back of the card, so to speak, there is also the reminder that there are adults who occasionally do the right thing, and kids who occasionally support you when you need it. Life is rarely unremittingly bleak. And after all, you survive, right? You grow up to be a famous film-maker.

But, again, in the back of my mind was the feeling that I was somehow being fed a stereotype. Isn't this reproducing what thousands of "decent" Pakeha think about Maori families? Absent fathers, who appear in kids' lives only to set the worst of examples; neglected children, exposed to drunken, violent, feckless adults; promises that are never kept; futures that are never prepared for -- isn't this the stuff of every sanctimonious, here-we-go-again media story about Maori people? And it's still a stereotype -- right? -- even if we laugh, and even if it's told from the inside.

Possibly, I'm being way too demanding. Movies last a couple of hours. What kind of "truth" can you convey in a couple of hours? How can you set the whole thing up without appealing to what the movie-goer already knows -- even if what he/she knows is decidedly partial? And all stereotypes contain grains of truth. You can't go to Bali without encountering the kinds of art forms portrayed in Di Bawah Pohon. You can't go to the East Cape without encountering the kinds of tumbledown places portrayed in Boy. Maybe what matters is how we're invited to ACT on the stereotype we're presented with. Is the depiction designed to make us love or hate, sympathize or despise, harden our perceptions or make us want to find out more?

But however we're invited to react, it's still a stereotype. Perhaps the worry at the back of my mind stems from the fact that both the Balinese and the Maori are a minority in their respective polities. It really matters what the majority makes of them. Would I be bothered by a stereotype of a middle-class white American male? Maybe -- but not in remotely the same way.

I guess this is why I'm a PhD student and not a film-maker. I worry far too much.