“Holy Crowd”, interview with the directors Reza Fahriyansyah and Ananth Subramaniam

Presented at the Cannes Film Festival as part of the International Critics’ Week initiative, Next Step Studio, “Holy Crowd” transforms a supernatural premise into a sharp reflection on social behaviour and collective hysteria.

Co-directed by Indonesian filmmaker Reza Fahriyansyah and Malaysian director Ananth Subramaniam, the short film begins with a seemingly impossible event: a woman dies, only to suddenly return to life during her funeral.

What initially appears to be a miracle rapidly spirals into chaos. The resurrected woman becomes the object of fascination, opportunism, and projection, while those around her attempt to extract meaning, power, or personal gain from the extraordinary situation.

For the filmmakers, however, the miracle itself was never the true subject of the film.

“We were very interested in herd mentality,” Ananth Subramaniam explained. Despite coming from different countries and cultural backgrounds, both directors recognised the same instinctive social patterns within Southeast Asian societies: the tendency to follow collective emotion, especially when confronted with religious or mystical phenomena.

The film uses absurdity and humour to expose how easily communities can transform belief into spectacle.

Faith, power and the comedy of human behaviour

One of the most compelling aspects of “Holy Crowd” is the uneasy balance between comedy and discomfort. The reactions surrounding the resurrection are frequently ridiculous, yet they also reveal deeper anxieties about faith, authority, and social pressure.

For Reza Fahriyansyah, questions of power became central to the project, “People always believe in something bigger than themselves,” he observed.

Rather than mocking religion directly, the film examines how belief systems can become performative under collective pressure. Crowds gather not only out of faith, but also out of curiosity, fear and opportunism.

The directors deliberately avoided treating the situation with solemnity. Humour emerged naturally during the writing process, largely because the irrationality of the characters’ behaviour felt simultaneously recognisable and absurd.

“Sometimes you just don’t understand why people behave this way,” Ananth Subramaniam admitted. “And that becomes funny.”

The comedy in “Holy Crowd”, therefore, functions less as parody and more as observation. The laughter comes from the unsettling familiarity of mass reactions, particularly in environments where religion, social hierarchy and public performance constantly overlap.

A powerless protagonist inside collective chaos

At the centre of the film stands Arif, the husband of the resurrected woman, who becomes an increasingly passive witness to the escalating madness around him.

The filmmakers intentionally constructed him as a character with almost no control over the situation.

“In front of the crowd, religion and culture, you are nothing,” Ananth Subramaniam explained.

Rather than turning Arif into an active hero, the directors were interested in exploring helplessness. His inability to intervene reflects the larger social structures surrounding him, where individual agency becomes insignificant once collective hysteria takes over.

This perspective also reinforces the film’s emotional realism. Despite the fantastical premise, “Holy Crowd” remains grounded in ordinary human vulnerability. Miracles may occur, but people still respond through confusion, selfishness and fear.

For Reza Fahriyansyah, maintaining that human scale was essential.

“Even with a very big situation, we still wonder how people feel about what happened,” he noted.

Co-directing across cultures

Although “Holy Crowd” emerged from a collaboration between filmmakers from Indonesia and Malaysia, both directors emphasised how naturally the partnership evolved.

Their creative relationship began informally, often through conversations over Indonesian food, particularly different regional varieties of soto.

“We bonded over soto,” Ananth Subramaniam joked.

Before writing, the directors established a shared principle for the collaboration: protecting each other’s creative freedom while leaving ego aside. They described the project as both an artistic experiment and a playful testing ground where ideas could become increasingly strange and excessive.

That openness proved particularly valuable during the writing process.

Ananth Subramaniam, who had never co-directed before, admitted that collaboration unexpectedly liberated him from the isolation that often accompanies screenwriting.

“Every time I got stuck, I could throw it to Reza,” he explained.

For Reza Fahriyansyah, the exchange also became a way of expanding visual and cultural perspectives, especially regarding funeral rituals and spiritual symbolism, which differ subtly between Indonesia and Malaysia.

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