Zoological wonder | Bangkok Post: Arts & Culture

There's only one giraffe in all of Jakarta, we're informed early in Postcards from the Zoo. "I like the form, the presence, the elegance. It looks like a centaur, the half-horse half-man," says Edwin, the director of the Indonesian film. "A giraffe always moves as if in slow-motion. It's so nice to make a composition out of it."

A scene from Postcards from the Zoo .

In this dryly surreal and gently idiosyncratic movie, a giraffe and its soft belly become an epiphany for a young woman who's grown up in Jakarta's Ragunan Zoo, and who later experiences a different kind of zoological wonder and heartache in the larger cage known as life. Postcards from the Zoo is one of the two movies from Southeast Asia that are currently competing for the Golden Bear at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival (the other is Captive from the Philippines), and Edwin _ the man with no surname _ has found his place in the front row of world cinema now with his brand of quirky humour and poignant observations. Indonesia has four films in Berlin's official selection this year; Thailand, usually the Southeast Asian roe model in the department of cinema, has only two.