197 - 232 Plaridel • Vol. 19 No. 1 • June 2022 Patriotic heroes on screen; Strategy of demonstrating power: Reading police’s images in the winning flms of the Police Movie Festival 2019 Muria Endah Sokowati & Frizki Yulianti Nurnisya Abstract This article analyzes the winning flms at Indonesia’s 2019 Police Movie Festival “Together We Are Strong.” This flm festival was organized by the Public Relations of the Indonesian National Police, which is alleg- edly one of the police’s eforts to control the media. We argue that the festival became the vehicle for police to build positive images since the media published some violent cases perpetrated by the police against civilians; or negative sentiment toward the police because several police ofcers held strategic positions in government. In order to fnd out the positive image raised by the police, we analyze the police fgures in these flm festival winners. The analyses include the basic ideas, characters, setting, ico- nography, and narrative events of the police fgures. The results show that the flm festival winners por- trayed police as patriotic heroes who defend the country from crimes that threaten the nation’s integrity through genre analysis. According to the discursive practice in flm, police’s images as patriotic heroes become an attempt by the police to perform their power in socio-political life, especially in Indonesia. Keywords: Patriotism, heroism, genre analysis, discursive practice, police’s movie