Indonesia Drafts a New Film Law as Jakarta Courts Netflix and Foreign Shoots

Indonesia has a first draft of a revised Film Law, and its capital, Jakarta, is working to bring film and TV crews to town. The Indonesian Film Agency (BPI), chaired by Fauzan Zidni, prepared the draft with the Ministry of Culture, according to Variety. The text has taken shape since the Cannes Film Festival in May.

The agency has been pushing for the change for months. Earlier this year, Zidni said the Ministry of Culture was expected to take the revision to parliament, the body that passes national laws. No date for that step has been reported.

Jakarta has been making its own offers to producers. The Jakarta Film Commission launched in June, alongside Filming in Jakarta, a one-stop service for production companies. The commission will offer free location scouting for incoming international productions, and Variety reports that certain location fees have been cut by 50%. Production companies from Malaysia and India have come to Jakarta to shoot films and series since the June launch.

Netflix is one of the clearest early users. Vice Governor Rano Karno says the streamer now has four titles in production through Filming in Jakarta. One of them is Tygo, a spinoff of Netflix's Extraction films, which is being filmed in the city.

Netflix has also agreed to help build local talent. A memorandum of understanding signed around the inaugural Jakarta Film Summit commits the company to developing Indonesian filmmakers. The summit was opened by Jakarta Governor Pramono Anung Wibowo on 20 October. He has set a goal of making Jakarta a film hub on the scale of Busan, the South Korean port city known for its film festival.

Money is part of the pitch too. Variety reports that Jakarta has introduced a 50% tax concession on cinema admissions for qualifying Indonesian films, which means a cut in the tax tied to ticket sales. The Jakarta Film Commission has also become an official member of the Asian Film Commissions Network, known as AFCNet, with help from the Busan Film Commission. Film commissions are city offices that help productions find locations and handle logistics.

On the financing side, Government Regulation No. 24 of 2022 on the Creative Economy allows financing based on intellectual property, the legal rights to creative work such as scripts and films. That gives producers another way to raise money beyond traditional bank loans and studio cheques.

The city's push runs alongside Jakarta Film Week 2026, which is scheduled for 21 to 25 October. Filmmakers and visitors can catch events through the week, and the period is a useful checkpoint for how far the draft law and the city's incentives have travelled since June.

For a general reader, the picture is simple. A country is rewriting its rules for making films, and its capital is offering cheaper locations, tax breaks and a single front door for producers. Whether those steps bring more productions to Jakarta is a question the coming months will answer.