This weekend, the 11th Jakarta Film Festival kicks off again with exciting promises for movie buffs. Despite tight schedules and congestion in the rainy season, they will try their utmost to enjoy the offerings.

Jakartans have come to see the JiFFest as their annual opportunity for special entertainment, provided by people working hard to this year bringing 170 films from dozens of countries. We look forward to another chance to understand other cultures, other experiences from faraway lands like Afghanistan and China, and the neighboring nations that we think we already know. From our own country, several filmmakers will have their works shown.

But where there's a party, there's a party pooper, it seems. This year it's the ban on Balibo, a documentary on the 1975 deaths of five journalists working for Australian media while covering military operations in a village in then East Timor. The film joins three others on the former East Timor that were also banned in 2006, and another on Aceh, another former hub of violent conflict.

On Tuesday, JiFFest organizers announced on their website that they had been informed by the censorship board that Balibo had been banned. The Foreign Ministry immediately said it would "explain" the situation to the outside world, and our lawmakers nodded in "understanding".

Also on Tuesday, the Jakarta Foreign Correspondents Club canceled a private screening of the film, saying it was worried the move might be considered breaking the law, as the screening was to be held in a public place.

The public is robbed, then, of the opportunity to see their own slice of history from a perspective that they have never been exposed to before. Actually, not many Indonesians would really care, so steeped are we in the official version of why and how East Timor was "integrated" decades ago.

But today's citizens would like to be thought of as intelligent and creative. They are not as ready as the elected legislators to nod in agreement to the censorship of this film, this book, this play. Indonesians are aware of the popularity of our pop musicians and films in neighboring countries, a showcase of what artistic freedom can do. The last suggestion from the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) to ban the movie 2012 was met with sniggers, as viewers said they found no problem with just another film on doomsday.

Every metropolitan in the region wants to be the next cultural hub, the latest "city of arts". Thanks to promoters and art lovers, Jakarta now has its jazz and dance festivals apart from the JiFFest, though organizers continue to lament the continued struggle for sponsorship.

Increasing support for these events is the least that the central and local governments can do. But a ban on a film, even if it's just one film, reminds the world that much of the old Indonesia is still here.

A military spokesman said screening the film here would "hurt many Indonesians", as if we were all scared to have many more people exposed to a glimpse of military operations in the 1970s. But rather than opening old wounds, sweeping things under the carpet would be the more appropriate description for every attempt to ban interpretations of our history. Then we would have learned little in over 10 years of reformasi.