Cosmic Balance

Andreas Johnsen / Denmark & Indonesia / 2025 / World Premiere / 77 min

Hour-long musical trance sessions lead a young man from a small Indonesian village to his first concert outside the city limits at a music festival in Denmark. A cosmic film about music, spirituality and heritage.

The young Indonesian musician Anggi was given away as an infant and grew up among musicians practicing the traditional music phenomenon Reak. Reak is practiced in West Java and is a spiritual cultural form where both musicians and audiences go into trance and are possessed by the spirits of their ancestors.

Now a young man, Anggi is set to become the new leader of his Reak group. But suddenly his competitors begin to question his ability to lead, as he is not related by blood to the group’s previous leaders. And as if that was not enough to deal with, there’s also trouble with his future in-laws who won’t let him marry their daughter because he has neither a proper education nor a respectable job.

In the midst of all this, the insecure and sensitive Anggi turns to reak culture, hour-long trance sessions and helpful shamans. And suddenly he finds himself in Denmark where he will perform outside his village for the first time at Roskilde Festival.