As a child growing up in Indonesia, film director Yosep Anggi Noen saw the power of "moving images" to draw people together and spur their imaginations, which left a lasting impression on him.

Back then, in the 1980s, his family was one of the few in the village of Kaliduren, near the cultural city of Yogyakarta on Java island, to own a television, and virtually every night neighbors gathered in front of the family's small black-and-white television for hours.

"I could see then how moving images could attract a lot of people and stir diverse thoughts," said Anggi, as he is commonly known, when interviewed by Kyodo News.

Looking back, he believes it is those childhood memories that set him on the path to becoming a filmmaker, which began when along with some classmates, he produced his first movie while in high school.

Using a small Sony handycam, he made a movie about a homeless man who finds the lunchbox of a student and intends to return it, but some hungry street boys want it too. The simplicity of the story is something that would come to define his cinematic craftsmanship.

Simple, common stories about daily life in Indonesia, focusing on the relations among people, sometimes with political overtones, frame all his movies, which have brought the now 34-year-old director to growing international attention.

His 15-minute movie "A Lady Caddy Who Never Saw a Hole in One" won the Grand Prix award at the Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia in Tokyo in 2014.

It tells a story about a daughter of a disenchanted farmer who loses his paddy field after the land is converted into a golf course despite strong resistance from villagers. It represents one among many cases of land disputes involving locals and powerful companies.

"Minor, simple events are always forgotten because they frequently or usually happen," Anggi said. "It always then becomes a challenge for me to make a movie based on the usual, simple things to be watched by people."

His work is inspired by everyday occurrences and observations, such as when rides on the bus or the train and encounters various characters, or when he chats with ordinary people at "angkringan," a push cart selling food and beverage on roadside, where Yogyakartans hang out, drink, eat and chat about various issues, including political ones.

"A film is nothing if we can't tell the story and a story is nothing if it doesn't represent life," he said.

More recently, his second feature-length film "Istirahatlah Kata-Kata" (or Solo, Solitude in English) was screened at the 69th Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland, the 21st Busan International Film Festival in South Korea, and in the Bright Future section for up-and-coming directors at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. It also won the top prize at the Jogja Asian Film Festival earlier this year.

Based on the life story of poet Wiji Thukul, whose writings were critical of the iron-fisted rule of Indonesian President Suharto, the fictional movie only focuses on a period in 1998 when Wiji was in hiding in the Indonesian part of Borneo island, far away from his hometown Yogyakarta and the wife he had left there.

The film was criticized at home for portraying Wiji as a coward instead of as a hero. It depicts an ordinary individual succumbing to fear at the thought of being captured by the security forces.

In his films, Anggi prioritizes his vision over what the public wants. Fortunately, compared to the past, non-mainstream or alternative movies, like his, have developed well in the past few years in Indonesia.

"They've begun to get more settled viewers," he said.

And the director, who was invited by the Okinawa Film Office in 2015 to make a movie there with Indonesian nuances, is still not interested in plunging into the mainstream film industry.

"Five years from now, 10 years from now, I may change my mind, but for now, I will stay in the non-mainstream arena," Anggi stressed.

"It doesn't mean the non-mainstream films are to be low-budget ones, but I don't want to be dictated to -- that the story should be like this or like that."

To boost his income, he also teaches documentary filmmakers once or twice a week at Universitas Multimedia Nusantara, a private university in suburban Jakarta.

"By teaching, I meet young people, from whom I always learn something new. They will own the world in the future and I am stealing their knowledge actually," he said with a laugh.

Official : Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia