Tumpal Tampubolon is a cinephile-turned-filmmaker, based in Jakarta, Indonesia. He graduated from Bandung Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in Math. In 2005 his first screenplay, The Last Believer, won the Jakarta International Film Festival (JiFFest) Script Development Competition for Best Short Fiction category. It was a chance for him to have first-hand filmmaking experience. Since then, he has written and directed several short films, which were screened in various domestic and international film festival. In 2007, Tumpal was selected to attend the Asian Young Filmmakers Forum, a filmmaker-in-residence program in Jeonju, South Korea for ten months. In 2009, Tumpal was selected to attend the Berlinale Talent Campus in Berlin. He is currently writing his first feature film screenplay, The Sidewalk Dogs, which received a script development support from JiFFest and Hubert Bals Fund in 2008.