At the 79th Cannes Film Festival, a grandmother and her nineteen-year-old granddaughter prove that philanthropy is a family affair.
By Maria Biardzka
Dress: JIKI Monte Carlo creations; Photographer: Lou Yang
When Farina Dawis and her granddaughter Kyra Kolim walked the red carpet at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, they carried with them something more significant than evening wear. They carried a shared conviction, passed down across generations and thousands of miles, that privilege demands generosity.
The two were in Cannes as guests of the United Society Council, the international philanthropic organisation led by Jessica Chaijaya, which this year brought a delegation of Indonesian, Australian, and Chinese philanthropists to support the first TIME Charity Gala during the festival. The gala raised awareness for the No More Plastic Foundation, a cause close to Chaijaya’s heart as a woman born in Indonesia, a country whose identity is shaped by the ocean surrounding its seventeen thousand islands.
But the story of USC’s Cannes presence is perhaps best told through the Farina’s and Kyra’s family and the distance between a grandmother who has spent decades giving back in Indonesia and a teenager who is just beginning to imagine how she might do the same.
Farina Dawis was born in Sumatra. Over the course of her life she has supported cancer research foundations, community development projects, and initiatives aimed at narrowing what she describes as Indonesia’s enormous wealth gap. When asked whether there is one cause closest to her heart, she resists choosing. There is simply too much to do.
What drives her is not any single issue but a fundamental belief: that meaningful change often begins with small acts of care and contribution. She is clear-eyed about the scale of the challenge in Indonesia, but equally clear about something she sees as uniquely hopeful: a younger generation that studies and gains experience abroad, then comes home to build up the country.
Kyra Kolim, at nineteen, is already part of that generation. Inspired by visionary filmmakers and visual storytellers, she is currently studying Visual Media Arts at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts with a minor in creative writing. She is drawn to storytelling: particularly screenwriting and the ways in which art can create awareness around social and environmental issues. She reads scripts the way others read novels, fascinated by the distance between the written page and the final vision on screen. She cites the screenplay for Juno as an example: reading it revealed choices the director later made that were far from obvious in the text itself.
Her interests are wide-ranging – painting, sketching, composing, playing instruments, cooking for friends, and singing – but they circle back to a consistent instinct: connection and generosity. She picked up cooking after moving to the US, not out of necessity, but because she discovered she loves the act of preparing food for others. She took a university course on friendship and continues to cherish relationships that go back to early childhood. She also sang and created animation for a single, “Dahan Putih,” a song that was composed and written by her mother, released in 2025.
Time Gala Dress: Poppy Dharsono
On the subject of No More Plastic, Kyra speaks with the directness of someone her age who has grown up watching environmental destruction in real time. She believes the change must come from within – from individuals choosing differently – and she wants to use her creative work to inspire exactly that. Not through lectures, but through stories.
But their presence in Cannes carried another layer of meaning: both Kyra and Farina came to the festival as ambassadors of Indonesian batik, the intricate textile art officially recognised by UNESCO as part of the world’s intangible cultural heritage. Batik is far more than fabric: each piece is created through a painstaking handmade process of hand-drawn wax-resist dyeing, a craft that demands patience, precision, and generations of inherited knowledge. By wearing batik on one of the world’s most photographed red carpets, grandmother and granddaughter were making a quiet but deliberate statement: that Indonesian culture belongs on the global stage, carried with dignity and purpose.
At Cannes, sitting beside her grandmother at the TIME Charity Gala, the picture was striking: two women from the same family, separated by decades but united by a shared understanding that wealth and creativity both carry responsibilities beyond the personal.
For Jessica Chaijaya, this is precisely the point. USC’s mission has always included championing young people who are already engaging with philanthropy, and Kyra’s presence in Cannes already at nineteen, on one of the world’s most visible stages, is a statement of intent. The next generation is not waiting to be invited. They are already here.
Photography: Najib Hajjar, Lou Yang, Maria Biardzka