KONTRUKSI IDENTITAS MINORITAS TIONGHOA PADA FILM PENGEPUNGAN DI BUKIT DURI KARYA JOKO ANWAR (KAJIAN SEMIOTIKA CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE)

The film Pengepungan di Bukit Duri (2025), directed by Joko Anwar, serves as a mass communication medium that sharply captures and critiques the reality of discrimination and repression against the ethnic Chinese minority amidst mass riots. This study aims to uncover and describe the construction of ethnic Chinese identity represented through visual and narrative sign systems within the cinematic work.

This research employs a qualitative descriptive approach using Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic framework, which dissects the physical manifestation of signs into icons, indices, and symbols. These semiotic findings are then synthesized with the macro-framework of Mary Jane Collier’s Cultural Identity Theory, focusing on the concepts of avowal and ascription. Primary data were collected from ten key scenes through purposive sampling and documentation techniques. Data validity was rigorously examined using theoretical triangulation.

The study reveals three main findings. First, visual signs (icons and indices) represent spatial exclusion and physical vulnerability, illustrating how the minority group loses civil protection and bodily autonomy amidst communal anarchy. Second, narrative signs (symbols) in the form of racial slurs and vandalism are utilized by the dominant group as instruments of social dehumanization to reduce the victims' humanity and legitimize violence. Third, the identity dynamics demonstrate absolute repression; intense negative labeling (ascription) by the majority obliterates the space for the ethnic Chinese community to assert their existence (avowal). As a survival mechanism, the minority group is depicted as being forced to conceal and sacrifice their authentic cultural attributes. This study concludes that cinematic elements structurally represent the identity fatalism of the minority group as a result of unequal power relations and the historical trauma of discrimination.