A Distant Call, the debut feature of Indonesian director Andrea Suwito, premiered at Hot Docs in 2026 and went on to a European premiere at Visions du Reel the same year, before Vienna sales agency Odd Slice Films acquired it for worldwide distribution. Its subject is Eka, one of the last remaining bissu among the Bugis people of South Sulawesi.
The Bugis recognize five genders, and the bissu, understood to embody both masculine and feminine souls at once, have long held a distinct religious role: officiating weddings, consulting with bissu elders, and carrying out ceremonial blessings for the community. Suwito's film follows Eka through the everyday texture of that role, running a bissu-linked wedding garments shop and discussing tradition with elders, while a second calling presses in from outside it. Eka is also considering the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca among Islam's central obligations, and the film sits with an unresolved question rather than answering it: whether a transgender bissu can complete a sinless Hajj at all, and what it would mean to try.
Reviewers at Hot Docs described the traditions of South Sulawesi as shown "on full display," and a broadcast cut commissioned by ZDF and Arte, The Five Genders of the Sulawesi, gives Eka's account of bissu religious life a public reach beyond the festival circuit it began on.
Bissu practice is often described from outside as endangered, its numbers thinned by decades of pressure since a mid twentieth century purge. What A Distant Call adds is not that framing but Eka's own negotiation of it: someone for whom the ceremonial and the devotional are not separate questions but one continuous life, still being lived.