There is a moment, somewhere between exchanging favorite films and confronting each other’s psyche, where two strangers from different countries have to decide whether they can actually make something together. For the eight directors at the center of “Next Step Studio Indonesia 2026,” that moment arrived last year in Jakarta. The result, screening in Cannes’ Critics’ Week, will be visible to the world: four short films, each co-written and co-directed by one Indonesian filmmaker and one counterpart from elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The program is the first Indonesian edition of Next Step Studio, a traveling initiative that began as La Factory at the Filmmaker’s Fortnight in 2013 and has since rotated annually through different countries. Its creator, producer Dominique Welinski, designed it around a specific conviction: that the compressed, cross-cultural process of co-writing and co-directing with a stranger is itself a form of filmmaker training that no lab or residency quite replicates.…