They Call Me Babu

In the 1940’s, native Indonesian girls work as nannies (pembantu) for colonial Dutch families. The young Alima decides to escape from an arranged marriage and work as a pembantu to care for baby Jantje. Through all her new impressions and thoughts, she looks critically at colonial society and her own position.  She experiences World War II, the Japanese occupation (in which her Dutch family ended up in internment camps), and afterwards the hard-fought independence of Indonesia. All these years Alima remained loyal to the child, but she was also loyal to Riboet, her beloved who fought in the Independence War.