Boenga Roos dari Tjikembang (1931 film)

Boenga Roos dari Tjikembang (literally Rose from Cikembang) is a 1931 film from the Dutch East Indies directed, produced, and filmed by The Teng Chun. Based on a 1927 novel of the same name, it follows the complicated romantic situations of two generations of ethnic Chinese in the Indies. An early example of domestic sound films, the film was remade in 1975.

The plantation worker Oh Ay Ceng must leave his beloved, Marsiti, after his father arranges for him to marry his boss' daughter Gwat Nio. Accepting this in melancholy, Marsiti tells Oh to follow his father's wishes and leaves; she later leaves the plantation and dies. Gwat's father reveals that Marsiti had been his daughter with a native mistress and hints at another secret, one which he is unable to tell before he too dies.

Together, Oh and Gwat have a child named Lily. When she is older, Lily is betrothed to Sim Bian Koen, the child of a rich plantation owner. When Lily dies, Sim threatens to go Guangdong and join the army there. Before his departure he goes back to his father's plantation. On the way, he is shocked when he meets Roosminah, Oh's illegitimate child with Marsiti who greatly resembles her half-sister, at a graveyard. Eventually Sim and Roosminah are married.

Boenga Roos dari Tjikembang was produced, directed, and filmed by The Teng Chun, a peranakan Chinese film importer who had studied in Hollywood in the early 1920s before going to Shanghai to work in the film industry; for the film he established his own studio, Cino Motion Pictures. The single-system camera used on the film was borrowed from a Mr Lemmens, a teacher at the Technische Hoogeschool in Bandung (now the Bandung Institute of Technology). The film was based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Kwee Tek Hoay, which had been published over several instalments in Panorama in 1927; this story had later been adapted as a stage play by the Union Dalia Opera.