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The everyday is important, so just sit and watch. This is what filmmaker Leonard Helmrich gently told viewers as they prepared to take in his powerful trilogy at Dutch cultural center Erasmus Huis in South Jakarta earlier this month.

In this era of cryptic tweets and shaky video clips showing us sensational snippets of porn, terrorism and murder, it was a revelation to see that audiences were indeed able to sit through three feature-length films devoted to documenting the lives of a few ordinary people in Jakarta.

Helmrich’s trilogy, “Eye of the Day” (2001), “Shape of the Moon” (2004) and “Position Among the Stars” (2010), does not focus on issues of nation and politics, but rather is tethered to the lives of a struggling family. It tells the small stories of widow Rumidja Sjamsuddin’s brood of fascinating characters as they bumble their way through a full decade in their small, oddly constructed house in Jakarta.

Big political events such as the fall of Suharto, the Asian financial crisis and the rise of fundamentalism constantly impinge on their lives to be sure, but these are incidental to our immersion in the family’s struggles and fortunes, their grapples with faith and fear.

At the end of the trilogy we’re not rooting for a tolerant, secular state, we’re praying that the orphaned granddaughter, Tari, can finish college. We want the errant son, Bakti, to be a responsible family man and we wish that Rumidja can see her dear ones happy and settled while she tries to choose between living in Jakarta and moving back to her village.

In a post-screening question-and-answer session, the director — who seems much younger than his 52 years — said his inspiration to make the films could be traced back to his Javanese roots. Helmrich’s mother was born in the village of Kalimiru, Central Java, where Rumidja and her husband lived.

In the mid-1990s, Helmrich spent a lot of time with the couple and their son, Bakti, researching ideas for films, and finally decided to document the Sjamsuddin family, with whom he had grown close. They must have become like a second family to him, because for the next 12 years he lived with them, capturing scenes of impossible intimacy.

While much has been made of Helmrich’s revolutionary style of filming, which he describes as “single-shot cinema,” or a preference for long takes with one roving camera, it was not technique or technology that enabled his proximity to his subjects — it was sheer patience and devotion.

How did Helmrich manage to get so close to his subjects? How did he film the evanescent moments of a teenage girl out on a date in a city bustling with millions of people? Or the moment she gets slapped by her uncle? How do we get to observe Rumidja’s friends as though they were sitting on our own front porch? And why do we feel that we’ve known Bakti for years?

The answer lies in the director’s extraordinary ability to observe, remain unobtrusive and use his camera intelligently. The scenes are subtle and there is little editorializing. This decision not to lecture us on poverty, religion and nationalism, but let us observe these simple quotidian episodes, was a seminal one. The films are haunting in the way they ambush and envelop our emotions.

Helmrich and his collaborators, most notably second cameraman Ismail Fahmi Lubish, have made cinematic history. As an avid viewer of documentaries, I find it hard to come up with a comparable series of films shot primarily in the cinema verite style — a term used to describe documentaries made by the patient, unobtrusive filming of real life without interviews or voiceover.

If the pioneers of this field, documentarians like Ricky Leacock, Jean Rouch and John Marshall, were alive today, they would certainly have been spellbound. I certainly hope that living legends Frederick Wiseman and Albert Maysles have had a chance to view these films.

Of course, I am not the only one who thinks so — just ask the jurors at Sundance or at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, where the films have won the highest honors.

The best films, of course, are those endorsed by both critics and audiences, and gauging from the constant tittering, laughing and hushed commentary in the theater last week, the many Jakartans who doggedly showed up three nights in a row were undoubtedly engaged by the films.

Helmrich’s tour de force does, however, take a bit of time to gather momentum — the camera work in the first film is a bit skittish, but by the second installment, we are rewarded with calm, stable images. With time, Helmrich seems less interested in showing off his occasionally acrobatic style of camera maneuvering and gives us simple, stately shots that bring us closer to the characters. The best cinematography is when you forget that there is a camera present, and there are several such moments throughout the trilogy.

One of my favorite scenes is when the family is waiting for the train in Kalimiru and old Rumidja tells a teenage Tari that she will not be returning to Jakarta with her. Initially Tari does not believe her grandmother, and simply shrugs off her advice. A train approaches in the distance and Rumidja stands in the middle of the tracks and waves at it to stop — evidently the village does not have a train station.

Tari has a hysterical fit and clings to her grandmother while the family tries to get her on the train. The entire sequence takes a couple of minutes, but encapsulates the constant tragicomic dichotomy of these films. We are witness to a heart-wrenching moment of a family being separated, while an absurd situation develops simultaneously — a frail old woman standing her ground and bringing an entire passenger train to a standstill in the lush Javanese countryside. We smile through our tears.

The entire cast of the series was present after the screening of the third film. They stood just a few feet away from the huge screen that had magnified their joys, troubles and petty vanities and thrust them into our lives for three consecutive nights. The audience, much in awe of the subjects’ experiences and humility, had several questions for them. For a few minutes, the feisty participants of Helmrich’s films indeed found their place among the stars.

But on leaving the screening room, sitting in a taxi, I noticed the familiar enormous and gleaming concrete metropolis that Jakarta has rapidly become and thoughts about the fragility of the family loomed again. Will there really be a place for the Sjamsuddins in this city? Who does Jakarta really belong to?