Sastra Inggris

String Movie Maniacs (SMM) is a community for students in the English Letters Department, USD who share the same interest on movies. At first, String Movie Maniacs was made to criticize movies, but in the last few years, they have also started producing short movies. The club gets busy and actively meets when they start to produce a short movie. In their meeting, they usually watch movies and discuss them later on. Dito, the leader of String Movie Maniacs, told me that String Movie Maniacs have an upcoming workshop called “Movie Camp”. It is a workshop on how to make a movie in three days.

Bernardito Lambang, usually called Dito, leads the String Movie Maniacs in 2025. He mentioned that String Movie Maniacs produced a short movie called “Mosi” and got selected to be played in a short movie festival in India and London. Now, String Movie Maniacs have 33 members in total. There is no special requirement to join the community; you just need to have a strong passion to learn about movies and have some movie references to watch. String Movie Maniacs usually use their members’ movie references to watch and discuss the movie. Dito said that they rarely play top hits movies because some of the members had already seen them. So they usually played non-mainstream movies. They also played some Indonesian movies to learn, especially the other clubs or communities like SMM.

The unique and shocking part is that they only play the legal movie. Dito said that it is a form of support to the producer and the movie maker. They put themself in a position as a producer or movie maker and get bad treatment where someone accesses their work illegally. String Movie Maniacs is still using subtitles in the movie to learn unusual vocabulary that appears in the movie. Even though they learn English Letters in their study, they still need to learn more, whether it is the vocabulary, the pronunciation, or the culture. They find it interesting because subtitle can also sharpen their skills, and they can identify which subtitles have been mistranslated.




Dito, as the leader of String Movie Maniacs, also explained that some movies are related to the subjects in the English Letters Department. For example, they used to watch a World War movie that relates to one of the subjects of the Culture of English-Speaking Nations. At the end of the interview, Dito gave us a short movie recommendation. It is an animated short movie called “Serangan Oemoem” by Ravacana Films, produced in 2022. The title of the short movie is inspired by the tragedy of historical raid that happened in Yogyakarta to knock away Dutch colonialism. (LBTD).