Category: Malaysia

Ma, I Love You (真爱好妈, Chiu Keng Guan, 2023)

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A single mother experiences separation anxiety when she discovers her teenage daughter plans to study abroad in Chiu Keng Guan’s heartwarming drama, Ma, I Love You (真爱好妈). While the daughter yearns for freedom, she is also understandably wary of heading out into the world alone and as much as she fears her mother’s sometimes worryingly obsessive love also recognises that it’s costing her own freedom in her inability to rediscover something to live for outside her daughter.

The bond between the pair is unusually strong in part because of the father’s early death in an accident at the beach which has left Bee Ling clingy and over protective. Now 18, Qi Qi is acutely embarrassed by her mother’s habit of turning up unannounced when she’s out with her friends while insisting on driving her everywhere rather than letting her drive herself or take public transport. That’s one reason that she hasn’t told her she’s given up her part-time job to take French lessons and has applied to study at a university in France. 

It’s obviously a big adjustment for Bee Ling who has devoted her entire life to raising her daughter. Even her job as an insurance agent for which she has won countless awards as a top employee is something she’s only worked hard at to provide for Qi Qi with the end goal of buying a home where they can live together. As her friends and family try to point out to her, children aren’t meant to live with their parents forever and Qi Qi isn’t a child anymore. She wants her own life and the freedom to explore, while Bee Ling should also have the freedom to find new interests and ways to fulfil herself. 

While her friend Li Yan is excited about the idea of her son Zi Hao studying overseas, Bee Ling tries to do whetever she can to prevent Qi Qi going including visiting a shrine to pray that she fails the interview before boldly stating that she will simply go to France with her which is the opposite of what Qi Qi wanted. “I want to go to a place without you” she rather bluntly states, trying to get through to her mother that she wants to be free of her helicopter parenting. 

But then Qi Qi is perhaps a little more anxious than she makes out and afraid to head out on her own without her mother to look out for her. Following a series of setbacks, she appears to have given up walking blankly through an apartment Bee Ling wanted to buy vacantly replying that she’s happy to go with whatever her mother decides. Even Bee Ling is by this point a little less controlling, looking for a place with similar sized rooms and keen that Qi Qi decide how she wants to decorate her space but is also still quite dependent on her daughter not really knowing what she’d do with herself without her.

Ironically, through her campaign to frustrate Qi Qi’s plans to study abroad, Bee Ling begins to develop new interests and make new friends. An older French woman living in their building explains to her that life began again for her at 70. Her children are grown up with lives of their own, so why shouldn’t she be free to live as she pleases? Meanwhile, Bee Ling’s mother also begins to reflect that perhaps she made the same mistake coloured by the times in which they lived thinking that a girl should stay at home. She now regrets what might have been and sees that Bee Ling’s mistaken attempts to stop Qi Qi going abroad will only bring harm to them both.

In any case, as the title implies the pair eventually discover a way to rebalance their relationship with Qi Qi reflecting on the difficulties her mother faced raising her alone and Bee Ling discovering a new sense of possibility for the future in setting her daughter free. Together they begin to move past the shared trauma of the sudden loss of Qi Qi’s father while ready to embrace new challenges. “Life is elsewhere,” Bee Ling is told by a French teacher, suddenly finding herself ready to look for it while allowing her daughter to do the same.

Ma, I Love You screens Nov. 3/4th as part of this year’s San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Abang Adik (富都青年, Jin Ong, 2023)

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Displaced brothers find themselves trapped on the margins of a prosperous city in Jin Ong’s gritty drama, Abang Adik (富都青年). Essentially a story of brotherhood, Ong explores the fates of those largely cast out from mainstream society who must as one character later says be forever watchful, keeping a place to hide and to which escape while denied the most ordinary of things such as home and family for no reasons other than bureaucracy and prejudice. 

Both Abang (Chris Wu Kang-ren) and Adi (Jack Tan) were born in Malaysia but are technically undocumented and finding it difficult to replace their identification without things like birth certificates or access to other family members to help replace them. While Abang, who is deaf, is earnest and determined to do everything properly, Adi is sick of waiting for things to work out in his favour and has begun working as a middleman for traffickers to earn enough money to pay for a fake ID while supplementing his income with sex work. The pair are aided by social worker who tries to do her best to help get their documentation in order but finds herself with an uphill battle against implacable bureaucracy and governmental indifference. 

Ong spends most time with the brothers but makes clear the oppressive quality of the world inhabited by those trapped on the margins such as the undocumented migrants who become victims of a police raid following a tip from a broker taking kickbacks. As Adi later remarks they ask for workers to come and then they want them to go, irritated to see a policeman carrying a watch he appears to have just accepted as a bribe. With no other family members around them, the brothers have been cared for by a neighbour, transgender sex worker Money, who is like them locked out of mainstream society just for being who she is while Abang finds himself further disadvantaged by his disability and the difficulties involved in finding employment. 

Abang falls in love with a refugee from Myanmar but her family will soon be moved on to another country, while Ali develops feelings for one of his clients though she soon tells him she’s planning to move to another area to get married and enjoy a more stable if perhaps less financially comfortable life outside of the city. He offers to marry her instead, but really has nothing to give her other than his body. When a tragic accident sends the brothers on the run, they realise they have no one to rely on but each other and no real place to go. In a poignant monologue in the film’s closing scenes, Abang complains to a well-meaning monk that he is incapable of understanding his life or how difficult it has been for him to simply go on existing. He wishes that he could speak, that he had a family, that he had a safe space to call home and was not forever looking over his shoulder in case he had to leave in a hurry but instead all he gets is cosmic irony sacrificing himself to save Adi in the belief that he still has a chance at a better life if only he can swallow his pride, meet his father, and get an ID card. 

In the end they are both displaced, forcibly separated and pushed in opposing directions. Abang revisits their childhood, making paper aeroplanes as he once had with Adi and saying a final farewell with their ritualistic practice of cracking hardboiled heads on each other’s heads finding for a moment an identity as brothers reflected in each other. Ong shoots their marginalised existence in vibrant colour but also captures a sense of the city as oppressive and unwelcoming, as if it were actively ejecting them with its ubiquitous police patrols and constant danger while authority figures are largely corrupt and uncaring save the earnest social worker who ironically pays a heavy price just for wanting to help those who need it most. Melancholy if not exactly bleak, the film positions the brotherhood between the two men as a course of salvation allowing them to overcome a sense of despair in a society that seems all but closed to them.

Abang Adik screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival. 

Original trailer (Traditional Chinese / English subtitles)

Barbarian Invasion (野蛮人入侵, Tan Chui Mui, 2021)

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“Who are you?” the lead actress asks herself, at one point in several languages, as she tries to reclaim her identity from the library of roles which she must play key among them mother to six-year-old son and recent divorcee plagued by scandal. Tan Chui Mui’s meta drama Barbarian Invasion (野蛮人入侵), in which she also stars, is in part a search for the self along with the desire to assert ownership over a physicality that is otherwise uncomfortably shared but also an exploration of local indie filmmaking and the unique challenges faced by a female filmmaker in the South East Asian industry. 

Moon Lee (named for the Hong Kong star and played by Tan Chui Mui herself) was formerly a successful actress who married a high profile actor but has now divorced and is raising her six-year-old son Yu Zhou alone. Responding to a request from an old friend, she’s agreed to travel to the coast to revive her film career and has brought Yu Zhou with her as his father is filming in Japan and her mother has just had a knee operation. What Moon hadn’t realised is that she’ll be starring in a low budget action movie inspired by The Bourne Identity and that the director, Roger (Pete Teo), wants her to look convincing as a top assassin. Moon isn’t really convinced but begins to see it as an opportunity for personal growth training with the mysterious Master Loh (James Lee) who, like the wise old monk sitting outside, is fond of cryptic aphorisms.

Nevertheless, Moon’s attention is constantly diverted by Yu Zhou’s restlessness. He darts in to defend her while she’s trying to practice martial arts and runs away when left with a baby sitter, making friends with the daughter of a local cafe owner. She tells the assistant Cathy that when she was pregnant people would come up and touch her belly as if her body no longer belonged to her but had become public property. Moon resented being told that her baby was her greatest work, as if all of her other achievements paled in comparison to her motherhood and she herself had become nothing more than a conduit for her child’s existence. A mere 3D printer for the next generation, as she puts it. Yet what’s she’s doing is in effect an attempt to reintegrate body and soul. As the wise old monk tells her the body is not the prison of the mind but the mind a prison of the body. She achieves mastery over herself through embracing unconscious action. “What is “myself?” she asks Loh and finds the answer in the her that automatically raises its fist to her head in self-protection. 

But that doesn’t perhaps help her differentiate Moon Lee the woman from Moon Lee the actress and the various roles she’s played on and off screen. It seems there was a degree of scandal in her recent divorce that’s prompted her into a reconsideration of herself, while she is left feeling betrayed when Roger explains that the producers want to cast her ex Julliard (Bront Palarae) as her love interest and may even pick him over her if she refuses because he is still a big box office draw. Roger then gets a major offer of investment, but it’s from a Chinese actress who wants Moon’s part. Chinese producers want a Chinese star he tries to explain to an increasingly exasperated Moon who wonders what all this is for if she is so easily replaceable. 

In any case, an event which seems to transgress the borders between the real and the fictive throws her into the role of her amnesiac heroine who has only muscle memory along with the ability to speak several languages chiefly those spoken by roles she previously played such as a Burmese refugee and Vietnamese bride. Still, as her character begins to recover her identity she too comes into herself, brings some ironic closure to her relationship with her ex, and embarks on a somewhat mystic journey into the self all while ironically riffing on classic kung fu movie themes injected with a little contemporary pop culture. To the challenger the sword was everything, to Musashi everything was the sword Roger explains of a tale in which the elderly Miyamoto Musashi defeated a young rival through turning the world around him into a weapon, adding that to him while film was once everything everything is now film. And so it is for Moon in her ongoing psychodrama rediscovering herself among many others as she fights her way towards bodily autonomy and the reclamation of her authentic identity.

Barbarian Invasion screened as part of this year’s Five Flavours Film Festival and is available to stream in Poland until 4th December.

Original trailer (Simplified Chinese / English subtitles)

Imaginur (Nik Amir Mustapha, 2022)

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“It’s a pickle, isn’t it? Trying to remember what you don’t know you’ve forgotten.” So says the father of the hero of Nik Amir Mustapha’s touching sci-fi romance, Imaginur. It is however his son who’s trying to piece things back together while seemingly stuck in a maddening time loop chasing the ghost of lost love and searching for his “happy place”, the safest place he can imagine that will reconnect him with who he really is. 

Zahul seems to be haunted by fleeting glimpses of a woman whose face is hidden. After being involved in a traffic accident, he fetches up at the hospital but is there with his elderly father who is living with dementia. An elderly lady gives him a card for a special service called Hypnotica run by a mad scientist named Ramil who claims he can use hypnosis to cure Zahul’s panic attacks the most recent of which caused him to abandon his father in a supermarket after an awkward interaction with his ex. Ramil tells him that they’re simply going to revisist old memories with a new perspective to solve the cause of his anxiety but we can’t be sure when or if Zahul has actually left the state of hypnosis. Unable to remember or get a firm grasp on his reality he becomes panicked and short tempered, eventually paranoid and rambling about people trying to steal his brain.

Even so as someone puts it, his quest for Nur, a woman he meets at a burger stand, is also a quest for light and the path back towards himself in reclaiming his past even if it comes with the pain of loss on waking up to the reality. “This is what becomes of our lives” the sympathetic elderly woman laments of Zahul’s father, only for Zahul to reply that there’s no point resisting, but resisting is in a sense what he’s been doing trying to push through to a more concrete reality unwilling to accept the first or even second iteration of a moment in time but looking for the essential truth of it. 

What his father tells him is that the answer is what we feel in out hearts, that there’s nothing so important as feeling except perhaps the memory of it. That is in a sense what Zahul is chasing, trying to reorient himself through emotional logic while simultaneously reluctant as if avoiding something he doesn’t know that he’s forgotten. Meanwhile, he becomes increasingly paranoid about the shadiness of Ramli’s operation which even he calls a “pseudoscience” wondering if he’s caught up in some kind of conspiracy while convinced they’re trying to steal his brain or at least mess with it to drive him out of his mind. 

Yet it all seems to come back to a choice he didn’t and didn’t make watching the mysterious woman head towards a station with a suitcase but getting hit by a car before reaching her. “Remember me” she plaintively asks in the shared space of his mindscape, perhaps a phantom of his imagination but also a real woman he didn’t know he’d forgotten who holds the key to everything he is. “You live inside your head a little too much” Nur tells him, and she’s absolutely right while ironically advising him to find his happy place little knowing that perhaps he has and they’re already in it. 

Oneiric and elliptical, the film’s fragmentary dream logic in which Zahul is forced to relive a series of moments from getting a parking ticket to being at the hospital eventually builds towards a moving moment of cohesion as Zahul manages to find himself again accepting both love and loss along with memory in all of its emotional intensity. Opening with a classic hypnotic spiral, there’s a kind of charm in Nik Amir Mustapha’s retro production design in the lo-fi hypnotism headsets Ramil alarmingly claims turn off part of the brain along with the softened colour palate that lends a note of nostalgia to what we assume to be the present day. In any case there is something genuinely touching in Zahul’s determination to reclaim himself through remembering lost love and discovering the eternal in transient moments of happiness.  

Imaginur screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Teaser trailer (English subtitles)

Images: © 2022 Lumatic Films.

Love Conquers All (爱情征服一切, Tan Chui Mui, 2006)

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“Girls are mostly stupid” extols the dubious romantic lead of Tan Chui Mui’s debut feature, “they think their love can conquer all”. Ironically titled Love Conquers All (爱情征服一切, àiqíngzhēngfúyīqiè), Tan’s ‘90s drama wonders how true that might be or if in a sense love can at least triumph over reality as we watch the naive heroine falling wilfully or otherwise into a dangerous web of abuse and exploitation while torn between the innocent romance of a hometown boyfriend and the confusing compromises of seedy urbanity. 

Innocent country girl Ping (Coral Ong Li Whei) travels from her home in Penang to work in a relative’s restaurant in Kuala Lumpur. While using a pay phone to keep in touch with her family, she comes to the attention of John (Stephen Chua), a somewhat rough local man who quickly begins stalking her bizarrely enough with the offer of a bunch of bananas to which Ping claims to be allergic. Nevertheless, lonely in her new life in the city rooming with her employer’s young daughter Mei, she eventually gives in and begins a relationship with him. While they’re at a hawker stand one evening, he introducers her to his friend, Gary, whom he claims is a pimp. Gary’s modus operandi is to pick up a new girl every three months, make her his girlfriend and then disappear sending a friend to say he’s in trouble with some shady types and needs money fast. Unable to pay, the young woman is drawn into sex work which Gary forces her to continue on his return before selling her off to people traffickers and starting the process over again. 

Ping seems fairly horrified by John’s story, but inevitably experiences something similar herself as John expresses fear for his future given the precarity of his underworld life, turns up with bruises, and then disappears sending Gary to tell her he needs money fast. She knows what’s happening but goes along with it anyway, perhaps out of a sense of fatalism or as John has suggested because she gives in to the romantic fallacy that her love can save him though he only means to use and discard her. Or perhaps, who knows, it is just a coincidence and he really does love her after all. A minor moment of potential exploitation mirroring their earliest date in which she suggests buying him a jacket but he prefers a different, possibly more expensive one, may imply something different. 

In any case, Ping’s view of romance may be overly idealised informed by the brand of TV drama so cheesy that little Mei and her mum can’t help giggling as they watch. Mei too is in the middle of an innocent romance with a penpal who calls himself only the “Mysterious Man” which is on one level worrying even if her explanation that he usually talks about stuff at school implies they may be of a similar age and she may even know him. At different stages, both Ping and Mei are seen drinking at the cafe staring into space thinking of their respective romantic interests though Ping’s situation is obviously not quite so innocent. On a fairly coercive date in which he idly raises the idea of marriage and children, John drags her to the beach and posits an ideal family life in small house like that of his aunt to whom he introduces her as his wife but may or may not actually mean to provide her. 

“You have no choice unless you jump” John uncomfortably repeats as he completes his romantic conquest even as Ping continues to call her hometown boyfriend on the phone telling him she loves him even in front of a mildly jealous John. Perhaps their romance is to her a kind of fantasy of romantic sacrifice set in contrast with the more prosaic sacrifice she has made to leave her family and travel to the city. While working in the cafe she’s approached by another creepy guy only a little older than John but just as persistent and taking much the same approach insistently asking for her name though she eventually manages to brush him off. Yet the question remains, is Ping merely a romantic fool, “stupid” as John had said, or a young woman attempting to take control of her romantic destiny as perhaps Mei is doing when she asks her mother to drive her to her pen pal’s address so she can figure out what he looks like? Shot digitally in a retro 4:3, Tan’s debut feature is replete with zeitgeisty detail of Kuala Lumpur in the ‘90s and filled with the lacuna of nostalgia, but offers no real answers for the duplicitous nature of love. 

Love Conquers All streamed as part of Odyssey: a Chinese Cinema Season.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Zombie Infection (Belaban Hidup: Infeksi Zombie, Ray Lee Voon Leong, 2021)

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An indigenous village finds itself under threat thanks to concurrent waves of colonialism in Ray Lee Voon Leong’s indie undead drama, Zombie Infection (Belaban Hidup: Infeksi Zombie). “Don’t concern yourself with outsiders. Our longhouse should be our only concern” advises the village head, yet as the heroes will shortly discover nowhere is really as isolated as it might at first seem and the consequences of exploitation and abuse will eventually reach even the deepest of forests.

As detailed in the opening voiceover animation, evil Russian mad scientist Dr George (Weeam Shawaheen) has fled to Borneo after creating chaos elsewhere and is currently conducting his nefarious experiments on the marginalised taking villagers off the streets and tricking orphans with the promise of free medical care in return for participating in “clinical trials”. Unfortunately, Dr George’s marvellous medicine turns people into zombies which becomes a problem when a bunch of them escape along with a handful of orphans fleeing their captivity at the hands of the exploitative physician. After searching a nearby mall looking for a missing sister and picking up a little boy orphaned by his zombified mother, the gang make their way into the forest assuming that the rough terrain will make it harder for the zombies to follow them but unfortunately they are not quite correct in their assumption. 

Meanwhile, an indigenous village is going about its normal life hunting in the forest little knowing they are already under threat despite the persistent nightmares plaguing village head’s son, Gadang (Pablo Amirul). Gadang is soon to become a father for the second time but his relationship with his young daughter Suna is beginning to fray, his wife Jawai (Anna Melissa) cautioning him that he can’t keep making promises only to disappoint her later as he agrees to take her swimming in lieu of allowing her to accompany him into the forest. His father patiently sharpens knives, insisting that it’s best to be ready for any eventuality though village life seems to be happy and as far as they know there is no reason to feel unsafe. Nevertheless, the infection soon catches up with them even if they are slow to believe claims of an undead invasion coming from “outsiders” later blamed for bringing evil into the forest. 

Only, it wasn’t the orphans who brought it, one of whom has indigenous tattoos on his shoulders and speaks the same language as the other villagers, but arguably two of their own who had sold out their people to collaborate with Dr George in return for riches. Realising the scale of the problem on his hands, Dr George determines to look for an antidote but there’s nothing he can really do to put right the chain reaction his immoral greed has caused in his exploitative misuse of the marginalised members of a small South East Asian nation. 

“What has happened is indeed alarming” according to one of the villagers in what might be the understatement of several centuries, but isolation is no longer enough to protect their longhouse from the ravages of colonialism as they find themselves assaulted by hordes of man-eating monsters created by the greed and amorality of the infinitely corrupt Dr. George. Gadang is forced to face his nightmares, anxious in assuming his father’s responsibility to protect the village while mindful that he has perhaps in a sense neglected his duties as a husband and father while playing the big man in the forest. It’s just as well his dad sharpened all those knives, because they are its seems their last defence even as they’re forced deeper into the forest in search of a safety that may no longer exist. 

At its best when exploring the lives of the indigenous community, Zombie Infection reaches its stride only when arriving at the forest even while its attempt to shift focus from the fleeing orphans to the villagers is only partially successful. Nevertheless, the film makes the best of its meagre budget with some impressive prosthetics and zombie choreography as the villagers go after the undead threat with indigenous weapons and wearing traditional dress. Yet as the film’s melancholy conclusion perhaps implies, the legacy of colonialism can’t be overcome so easily leaving the survivors in the middle of a battle seemingly far from its end. 

Zombie Infection streamed as part of Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival 2021.

Original trailer (no subtitles)

Babi (Namewee, 2020)

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No stranger to controversy, Namewee’s latest, Babi, saw him once again questioned by the authorities when a complaint was lodged citing the film’s alleged “racist elements” which “tarnished Malaysia’s image” while the producer was also later accused of failing to gain the proper license for the film’s production. In fact, some were convinced that the film itself was fake and Namewee’s claims that it had been shortlisted for major international festivals were just bluster, yet it does really exist even if some really wish that it didn’t considering the rather bleak picture it paints of a society marked by racial discrimination and corrupted authority. 

Namewee opens with a lengthy context sequence outlining major events which occurred in the year 2000 from the Australian Olympics to Bush’s election while claiming that the shocking story he’s about to tell is true but was never reported because, it’s implied, it was covered up by the authorities. A boy dies at an ordinary high school, apparently having gone over one of the balconies and landing in the courtyard below. The school, panicked, want to get this cleared up as soon as possible, preferably before going home time because they’d rather the parents didn’t find out about it and are desperate to keep it out of the papers. For all of these reasons, it’s best for them to call the boy’s death a suicide, yet empathetic and soon to retire police officer Singh insists on a full and proper investigation. 

What follows is a Rashomon-like series of alternative witness statements each of which move silently towards the truth. What’s certain is that a fight broke out between rival gangs in the cafeteria after rich kid Kiet’s coke was knocked over, he assumed deliberately. Kiet is an extremely unpleasant and entitled young man resentful that no one likes him but constantly harping on about his prominent father while showing off his wealth by, among other things, driving a BMW to school. This perhaps plays into an unpleasant stereotype as Kiet is a member of the ethnic Chinese community which, despite being a minority, is resented by some Malays the film suggests for its supposed stranglehold on the national economy. The Chinese minority, meanwhile, continue to suffer degrees of discrimination. The boy who died, Chong, had been turned down when applying for a university scholarship because of his ethnicity despite his Malay friend Yisin attempting to speak up for him with the teachers. 

The teachers are, however, not interested and apparently extremely racist themselves. Arch villain Mr. Nasir quite obviously has it in for anyone not Malay, snapping as the leader of the Indian boys is questioned that “Indians are all liars” which is even more awkward considering the lead policeman is an Indian Sikh. Bullying another Indian student, he likens the necklace he’s wearing to a “dog collar” while branding Chong an “outsider” and an “immigrant” when he dares to ask questions about the procedures for awarding scholarships which Mr. Nasir claims are intended for the indigenous community while continuing to insist that Chong must be rich simply because he is Chinese. 

Mr. Nasir is himself a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the contemporary society and an embodiment of the corrupt authority that provokes the boys’ rebellion. He is actively, even gleefully, racist and routinely abuses his power in the most heinous of ways, while the leaders of the Chinese and Malay gangs also lost fathers to corrupt authority figures. Aside from his racism, Mr. Nasir is also extremely homophobic, taking aside an effeminate Indian student, ripping off his accessories, and later humiliating him. Yet his chief complaint is about the word scrawled on the bathroom wall, “Babi”, meaning pig, which he takes as a mockery of Islam. 

As the closing captions explain, the teachers were later transferred while a number of students were expelled from the school though we cannot know the veracity of Namewee’s claims, no one has apparently ever reported on the case. The incident remains “unreported but not forgotten”. In any case there is genuine poignancy in the frustrated friendship between a Malay boy and his two Chinese friends, eventually corrupted by jealousy and resentment caused by societal conservatism and discrimination. Yet as bleak and nihilistic as the film’s conclusion may seem, it does allow a ray of light in the youngsters’ eventual rebellion against the corruption which so oppresses them, united if only in a moment by their desire to break free of its duplicitous constraints. 

Babi screened as part of this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.

Original trailer (English/Traditional Chinese subtitles)

The Story of Southern Islet (南巫, Chong Keat Aun, 2020)

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A wife finds herself thrown into a complicated world of spiritual confusion when her husband is struck down by a mysterious illness he himself attributes either to black magic or divine wrath. Set in 1987 (a year which saw a series of authoritarian crackdowns), Chong Keat Aun’s autobiographically inspired tale A Story of the Southern Islet (南巫) is partly a treatise on the absurdity of national borders but also one of cosmological ambiguity in which the acceptance of that which cannot be explained provides the only hope of cure for those burdened by the sin of transgressing against the gods. 

The gods are a constant source of tension in the marriage between Yan (Jojo Goh), a Westernised educated woman from another village, and her husband Cheong (Season Chee), a superstitious Chinese-Malaysian who makes a living selling seafood at the local market. Yan wants to have the statue of local deity Datuk Gong moved, finding it inconvenient in front of their house while Cheong chastises her for potentially offending the god by disrespectfully hanging her washing out to dry right next next to him. All the trouble starts however when Cheong chases a poisonous snake away from the statue and accidentally damages the fence of the man opposite, Nam (Kuan Kok Hin). Cheong already feels conflicted, worrying that the snake was a manifestation of Datuk Gong and he may have made a grave mistake in being so unwelcoming when a an extremely upset Nam comes over late at night and bangs on their door insisting on compensation. Nam is then killed on his way into town to get repair supplies leaving Cheong feeling extremely guilty and later collapsing with a mysterious illness that among other things causes him to vomit rusty nails. 

To Cheong, that sounds like black magic, a mild degree of suspicion falling on devastated widow Keaw (Pearlly Chua). Yan first takes him to a regular hospital where he’s diagnosed with “food poisoning” and sent home with a few pills, Yan’s attempt to convince a nurse by showing her the nails backfiring as the young woman backs away in horror insisting that she have some respect, they are doctors not shamans. An attempt to ask a local hardware store to help her identify the nails ends in a similar fashion, the salesman offended by the implication that the nails he sells are rusty. Out of her depth, Yan finds herself progressing through each of the spiritual systems in place in the local area, turning then to a shaman who is offended that she hadn’t come to him earlier her local friend Loy (Ling Tang) explaining that she’s from another village and didn’t know shamans did healing only for the shaman to express incredulity not only that there are places where no one worships Datuk Gong but that Yan is a Malaysian woman who cannot speak Malay and needs Loy to interpret for her. 

Yet this village is on the border between Thailand and Malaysia, many of the local people speak Thai while the boys are prone to knock the TV onto a (not really suitable) Thai broadcast in an attempt to avoid the endless speeches about national unity and patriotism. Then again the boys attend a Chinese school where pupils are discouraged from speaking their home dialect and one girl’s mother has even changed her name in the hope of giving her an easier future (as part of Operation Lalang teachers not educated in Chinese were parachuted into Chinese-medium schools giving rise to fears of an attempt to undermine the language). No one at the market seems to want the local seafood, everyone wants the “better” quality, if apparently more expensive, catch from Thailand leaving Cheong with a minor business problem. The shaman tells Yan that Cheong’s condition was caused by accidentally urinating on sacred land but when she ventures into a cave in the hope of praying directly to the mountain deity a disembodied voice tells her that Nenkan Keriang is not so petty, and not only that neither is she Malay meaning the gifts Yan has been told to bring of betel nut and a sarong are also inappropriate. 

Nenkan Keriang’s sad story is in one sense a historical echo of female subjugation, Keriang apparently a Chinese princess who became the victim of an evil shaman after turning down his romantic overtures. If anyone would be motivated to help Yan, it is most likely Nenkan Keriang (and it may well be to her she eventually owes her salvation). Nevertheless, after Malay shamanism fails, Chong courts (further) controversy by sending Yan to ask a Muslim spiritual leader instead who first insists he no longer dabbles in Shamanism before agreeing to help giving Yan instructions and the equipment she needs to rid herself of an unwanted demonic presence squatting on her land. 

It remains unclear if Cheong’s affliction is self-delusion, that in his guilt over Nam and also a series of other minor transgressions including “stealing” fish from a paddy field that belongs to another deity he’s made himself ill and can only be cured psychologically through the reassurance of ritual, or if Yan, who may or may not believe herself, actively cures him by exorcising their demons with the assistance of a transplanted animist deity. Beautifully shot with a lingering ethereality, Chong’s mystical tale places gods and demons amid the everyday while demonstrating the ebb and flow of deeply held cultural beliefs in a border community where harmonious coexistence has long been the norm. 

The Story of Southern Islet streams in Poland until Nov. 29 as part of the 15th Five Flavours Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)

Hail, Driver! (Prebet Sapu, Muzzamer Rahman, 2021)

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“Big city, small people, tough life” a jaded sex worker commiserates, slowly bonding with an illegal taxi driver trying to find a way to live in contemporary Kuala Lumpur. The ironically titled Hail, Driver! (Prebet Sapu) casts its cosmically unlucky hero adrift, literally roaming the city and coming in a sense to a new understanding of it thanks to his impromptu conversations with fares many of whom are only slightly more lucky than he is. Yet while his radio constantly updates him on the upcoming elections, he struggles to believe that real change is possible or that he will ever find a way out of his itinerant poverty. 

Aman (Amerul Affendi) was once a writer, but times have changed and no one buys magazines anymore. He’s been living with his sister in the city, but his brother-in-law makes no secret of his unhappiness with the situation, arguing with his wife about Aman’s inability to contribute economically to the household. Hoping to make some extra cash, he decides to make use of his sole inheritance from his late father, a rundown but reliable and recently serviced vehicle, to become a driver with ride hailing app Toompang. The only problem is that Aman has no official driver’s licence and is unable to get one because of his colour blindness, while the car is technically not of a sufficient standard to be used as a taxi. Paying a middle man for fake documents, he begins working but is quickly made homeless when his brother-in-law changes the locks while he’s out one day and announces he’s bringing his own brother to live with him instead forcing Aman to make the car his home, using public conveniences to wash and occasionally sleeping in 24-hr establishments such as laundromats. 

Aman’s plight is an encapsulation of the problems of the modern city, the radio explaining that house prices are a major point of interest in the upcoming elections. He searches for affordable accommodation but finds nothing suitable while quizzing his various fares about their living conditions, whether they rent or own their homes and how much they pay. One woman with a young son explains that of course she rents, there’s no way she could buy on her low salary while starting a business of her own is, she claims somewhat crassly, a no go because of the “flock of immigrants” in the city. Another of Aman’s fares reveals he came from Bangladesh some years ago, works in a hotel, and shares a reasonably priced apartment with his brother. Meanwhile Aman ferries sleazy politicians and their much younger mistresses to just such establishments. 

It’s his innate kindness, however, which eventually allows him to move forward after accidentally bonding with Chinese-Malaysian sex worker Bella (Lim Mei Fen) who came to the capital from Penang in search of a better future. She offers to let him use her spare room in return for his services getting to and from her clients, but even as they begin to develop a kind of mutual solidarity Bella confesses that she’s never felt a sense of belonging in the capital while her abandonment issues, her mother apparently living in the US after leaving her behind at five years old, have left her feeling spiritually homeless. “Not all dreams can be achieved” she advises Aman, each of them united in a sense of defeat as they reflect that nothing ever changes hearing the news that the party in power has again won the elections despite the ongoing problems in the city. 

Filmed in a crisp black and white, reflecting both Aman’s colour blindness and sense of hopelessness, Hail, Driver! paints an unflattering portrait of life on the margins of a burgeoning metropolis but eventually finds a degree of possibility in the unexpected, perhaps in its way transgressive, connection between the Malay taxi driver and Chinese sex worker who eventually find a sense of belonging, of home, in each other even as they bond over shattered dreams and urban disappointment. A striking debut feature Muzzamer Rahman’s empathetic drama captures the elusive city in all its unobtainable beauty, apartment blocks literally towering oppressively over the kindhearted Aman, but finally suggests that freedom may lie only outside of its repressive borders. 

Hail Driver! streamed as part of this year’s hybrid edition Udine Far East Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Boluomi (菠蘿蜜, Lau Kek Huat & Vera Chen, 2019)

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Legacies of trauma and displacement frustrate the connection between two floating youngsters in Lau Kek Huat & Vera Chen’s poetic drama, Boluomi (菠蘿蜜, Bōluómì). Making a direct connection between the Malayan Emergency and a sense of rootlessness in the contemporary generation, Lau & Chen send their conflicted hero overseas in an attempt to plant himself anew but even there he discovers himself merely another kind of other even as he forms a tentative bond with a similarly displaced woman rendered still more marginalised by her undocumented status and inability to speak the language. 

The film opens with the central trauma which is itself one of many as a child is born to a communist guerrilla fighter, Gyun (Vera Chen), and is then abandoned in the forest hidden inside the shell of a jackfruit or “boluomi” as is the custom apparently intended to ensure the child’s survival. In this case the child does indeed survive and like the opening of a fairytale is rescued by an older muslim Malay couple who have no children of their own and decide to adopt him, giving him the name “Mi” inspired by the unusual circumstances of his birth. Segueing to the present day we’re introduced to the hero, Yi-fan (Wu Nien-hsuan), just as he’s been humiliatingly stopped at customs on his return to Taiwan where he is studying agriculture because the homemade sambal his mother gave him is apparently too fragrant for the authorities’ taste. They won’t meet until later, but it’s at the airport that he first crosses paths with Laila (Laila Ulao), a young woman from the Philippines escorted out as one of many “carers from South East Asia” though as we later discover her true destination is a local massage parlour where she works as a cleaner in order to send money home to her family. 

Connecting the two timelines through a fragmentary dream we can assume that the abandoned child is Yi-fan’s father and that his double abandonment, later taken away from the loving older couple he believed to be his parents when his birth mother resurfaces, is responsible for his rage and fecklessness which has in turn left Yi-fan angry and resentful. The legacy of the Malayan Emergency is also perhaps connected to his feelings of alienation as a member of the Chinese minority, denied a place at university he feels solely on the basis of his ethnicity. Yet when he gets to Taiwan he’s suddenly not “Chinese” enough and incongruously finds himself speaking Malay even if there’s a double irony in being told that he should speak Chinese while in Taiwan. His professor with whom he seems to be on slightly awkward terms, perhaps another manifestation of his suspicion of male authority figures, pours cold water on his suggestions of finding a way to stay in Taiwan by opening a business instructing him that diaspora students have a duty to go home to stimulate social change. 

In a rather pregnant metaphor, the teacher’s opening lecture concerns foreign fruits successfully transplanted to Taiwan but also uncomfortably references viruses lurking in the soil, while Yi-fan’s attempts to grow a hybrid boluomi tree by grafting the Malaysian plant onto the Taiwanese eventually fail in parallel with his frustrated relationship with Laila who finds herself equally rootless while attempting to care for a fragile friend trafficked from Vietnam as a mail-order bride and now suffering ill heath but afraid to get treatment because of her status as an undocumented sex worker. Yi-fan befriends Laila by becoming an interpreter, helping her at the post office by translating into their shared language, English, and thereafter deepening their connection through the similarities found in Malay and Tagalog. Yet Yi-fan’s simple dreams of romance are frustrated by the world in which they live even as the pair bond through a shared sense of continual displacement. 

Try as he might, Yi-fan can’t make the boluomi grow, though it seems Laila could, putting down firmer roots while Yi-fan remains perpetually on the margins unable to escape the legacy of loss and alienation even in wilful migration. Struggling to survive in the precarious, largely hidden migrant worker underclass, Yi-fan and Laila’s romantic fantasy can never be more than just that though eventually comes full circle with another boy abandoned in the forest and a tree finally taking root.

Boluomi streams in Poland until 6th December as part of the 14th Five Flavours Film Festival.

Original trailer (English subtitles)