Pelabuhan Berkabut (2024): A Chant of Fish from the Head of a Fish – Surviving Amid Food Injustice

The film opens with a striking scene: three fathers at a security post hurriedly dividing a fish into three parts head, body, and tail. One of them protests upon receiving the head, the part with the least meat and the most bones. Most people avoid it. Just like a father, the head of the family who carries the weight of everything, yet often gets the least in return.

Rozaq, the film’s central character, embodies this burden. He is a father trapped in economic hardship, with a pregnant wife who needs the protein from fish to nourish both herself and their unborn child, and to prevent stunting. But access to nutritious food is blocked by the monopoly of fish middlemen. A midwife warns Rozaq of the dangers of malnutrition for his wife and baby, yet also forbids him from fishing at the harbor due to the risk of violence by the middlemen. This highlights the cruel dilemma faced by the poor, how even survival requires them to confront systemic violence.

Eventually, Rozaq chooses to steal fish from the middlemen. He knows the risk, but desperation pushes him forward. His act is not rebellion, but survival. Rozaq doesn’t protest or demand systemic change. He simply takes what should rightfully belong to his family. This kind of quiet resistance, an act of survival, should be a fundamental human right. Yet the system brands it as a crime. Instead of liberation, such acts only tighten the loop of oppression.

The film’s most surreal moment arrives when Rozaq discovers a group of fathers eating raw fish inside a ship, who then transform into fish themselves as a green fog rolls in. The fish once eaten by humans now consume humans in return. This eerie reversal critiques the exploitation of natural resources. While the poor scramble to steal fish to stay alive, the capitalist system driven by the fish middlemen turns them into part of the very chain of exploitation. The green gas may symbolize the toxic presence of capitalism, slowly eroding human dignity. The fathers who transform into fish could represent people who’ve lost their identity under the system’s pressure, while Rozaq becoming a fish-spirit hybrid is caught in limbo between man and commodified resource.