Cancel anytime 2190 Movies. A new one everyday
Watch anywhere
When American actor and director David Dawkins falls in love with Balinese woman Ketut Mariyati, her father's refusal to grant permission forces the couple to invoke a traditional clan ritual: draw up a wedding contract and kidnap the bride. What follows is three days of tense interclan negotiations that pit two neighbouring communities, and two very different cultures, against each other. Filmed almost entirely on Dawkins's own video camera, the documentary is both an intimate love story and a revealing portrait of Balinese custom.
AWARDS
Balinale, Bali International Film Festival. Audience Award for Balinese Culture
OFFICIAL SELECTIONS
IDFA
Mill Valley Film Festival
A forbidden romance, a bride kidnapping, and Balinese clan tradition
A video camera, a forbidden romance, and a centuries-old Balinese ritual: The Wedding Contract is one of the most personal and culturally immersive love documentaries available to stream, blending intimate first-person filmmaking with a genuine clash of clan tradition and cross-cultural misunderstanding.
When American actor and director David Dawkins asks his Balinese partner Ketut Mariyati to marry him, her father refuses permission, a refusal that carries serious weight in Balinese culture. The only recourse available to the couple is a traditional clan procedure: draw up a formal wedding contract, then have the suitor kidnap his bride and take her to his village. Three days of charged negotiations between two neighbouring clans follow, made all the more complicated because the suitor is a Westerner. The film navigates the tension between clan against clan, and East against West, documenting how love becomes a political and cultural negotiation as much as a personal one.
David Dawkins directs and appears as himself throughout the film, shooting almost all of the footage on his own video camera. His background in theatre, formed over a decade travelling with an itinerant company, gives the documentary a strong sense of performance and narrative. Ketut Mariyati appears as herself, and her relationship with Dawkins forms the emotional core of the story. Both subjects are listed in the film as principal cast, making this an unusually collaborative piece of personal documentary filmmaking.
The Wedding Contract earned the Audience Award for Balinese Culture at Balinale, the Bali International Film Festival, a fitting recognition given how deeply the film engages with Balinese custom and community life. It was also selected for the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) and the Mill Valley Film Festival, two of the most respected documentary platforms in the world.
Shot on location in Bali, Indonesia, the film functions as both a travel documentary and an anthropological record of Balinese clan society. Dawkins gains access to village councils, clan elders, and community ceremonies that would be invisible to a casual visitor. The result is a rare window into how religious and communal tradition governs even the most intimate personal decisions on the island.
The Wedding Contract is available to stream on GuideDoc. GuideDoc is a curated documentary streaming platform dedicated exclusively to documentary film. If you enjoy this film, you may also find Do You Want to Cross the Sea, This is Love, or Tying the Knot of interest as related people and culture documentaries on the platform.
2190 films
And a new one every day
The preferred platform
of true documentary lovers
Half of all revenue goes
directly to the filmmakers
