This Is The Reason Indonesian Star Dian Sastrowardoyo Struggles For Women

Dian Sastrowardoyo (Instagram @therealdisastr)

JAKARTA - Model Dian Sastrowardoyo, who changed professions to become the award-winning actress, manages scholarship funds to help young women get education and leave a trail in the world.

Indonesian actor and filmmaker Dian Sastrowardoyo started his career as a model when he was a teenager, hoping to save enough money to study abroad.

His entertainment career skyrocketed and Dian never got the title from a foreign university. But now, more than 20 years later, dozens of other Indonesian women continue their studies, and that's all thanks to Dian.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, the 42-year-old woman said that she "needs to pave the way" for women in Indonesia to gain access to higher education, inspired by Raden Adjeng Kartini, an Indonesian national hero who fought for women's rights more than a century ago.

More than 30 women have received undergraduate scholarships named Dian since she started the initiative in 2015. Some of them work as managers of startups and legal assistants, while others have earned titles in informatics and veterinary medicine.

Dian also collaborated with Markoding, a local nonprofit, to run programs and free coding lessons for hundreds of Indonesian women.

If you want to invest in education, one of the main fields that must be invested is women because mothers are basically the first teacher in human life. If you invest in women, you also invest in their children and grandchildren," he said.

We opened the horizon for these girls, and now many of them have worked.

Cigarette Girl

With more than 9.2 million followers on Instagram, Dian is one of the most famous Indonesian actors.

She is also the face of Girl Kretek (Cigarette Girl) on Netflix, a period drama based on a 2012 novel that is an epic and tragic romance set in the Indonesian clove tobacco industry in the 1960s.

clove cigarettes, known locally as kretek, popular in Indonesia, are made using tobacco, cloves, and other ingredients. The National Institute of Cancer in the United States has warned that the kretek "contains nicotine and many chemicals that cause cancer".

Dian plays 11, the main character and a woman in an industry dominated by men, who experiments to create the best formula for the family's clove cigarettes as she struggles against a patriarchal society.

Feby Indirani, author of 10 fiction and non-fiction books, whose own work is in the process of being adapted by an Indonesian production house, said: "The more filmmakers and creators who care and care about women's issues and minority groups", but the challenge is how best to represent and describe these issues.

For me, [Cigarette Girl] is very interesting. And of course, there is a story about women in it. Ironically, this is a story from the past, but even now, we are still familiar with stories like that," he told Al Jazeera.

"How difficult it is for women to stand out in an industry that is considered very masculine. In this case, the kretek cigarette industry, with its discrimination," he added. I am quite happy with a story like this.

In preparation for the role, Dian stopped playing sports like tennis and didn't meet his regular friends for some time just to follow the rhythm into the world ofuzyah because he was lazy.

"He really enjoys his loneliness and with all his knick-knacks and, you know, all these scents in his laboratory. And, in my opinion, someone should be able to know how fun it is alone to describe that pleasure," said Dian.

"I'm a very social person, and I really need to change my personality 180 degrees for this." said Dian.