KUALA LUMPUR, July 30 — Amid the temporary freeze on a film set in pre-Merdeka Malaysia, two film-makers here expressed their disappointment with the irrationality that met any attempt to retell the nation’s history that differed with what far-right elements consider “official”.
This comes as the release of “The New Village”, a local film telling a forbidden love story set amid a turbulent historical period, was suspended by the Home Ministry from its original release date of August 22 on Sunday after its trailer sparked a storm on the Internet.
Although still unreleased, the trailer was enough to draw a raft of accusations from extreme right-wingers that the movie sought to glorify the communist insurgents from the Malayan Emergency, with some accompanying their outpourings of anger with threats of arson.
“It’s the sort of thing that in a developed country would be no big deal ... After all you’re just showing different sides of history. Why is there this desire to claim history by ‘copyrighting’ it?” independent film-maker Amir Muhammad told The Malay Mail Online.
In 2006, Amir’s documentary “The Last Communist” was banned from being shown in Malaysia by the Home Ministry, but enjoyed several screenings in prestigious international film festivals in Berlin, Seattle, London, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
Another independent film-maker, Ho Yuhang, suggested that Malaysians are unable to face certain parts of the local history without reacting irrationally, citing the Pavlov experiment where dogs salivate upon hearing bells.
“That’s how we are now because I think the education system has made us behave that way so we are unable to deal with history or certain aspects of history reasonably,” he told The Malay Mail Online.
“I believe you can make a film responsibly but my problem is I don’t understand why communism is still a taboo or why May 13 is still a taboo,” the award-winning film-maker said of the communists that the country had fought against after World War II and the May 13, 1969 racial riots.
“Things are so polarised right now ... We should be fair, anybody should be able to create any story they want in any historical setting,” said Amir, who is also an independent book publisher.
Both film-makers mentioned the Quentin Tarantino film “Inglourious Basterds”, which they said was given total creative licence in the alternative retelling of events in World War II. Amir also highlighted another recent Tarantino effort, “Django Unchained”, which dealt with the controversial subject of black slavery during pre-Revolution America.
Amir also noted that Malay history has never been viewed from a fixed sole viewpoint, especially the ancient hikayat (saga) that were not 100 per cent historical facts.
“Why are we conveniently forgetting that?” he asked.
Much like “Tanda Putera”, another historical nationalist film set to be released in August, Amir and Ho claimed that the films have been treated unfairly by a fervent crowd who had formed their conclusions based on the short trailers alone without having watched them.
“It’s quite amazing, it also shows Malaysians have a very imaginative mind,” Ho added.
In a joint statement yesterday, Astro Shaw and Yellow Pictures, the joint producers of "The New Village", moved to clear the air amid accusations by Malay-language weekly Mingguan Malaysia that the movie aimed to “glorify” communism.
“The New Village is a Chinese period feature film in Mandarin that depicts a forbidden love story. This Chinese movie is set against the backdrop of the struggles of the Chinese communities in the resettlement into new villages by the British,” the two companies said in a two-paragraph statement.
The Mandarin film is directed by Wong Kew-Lit, a local award-winning film-maker whose works have been broadcast on both terrestrial and satellite television networks.
The 42-year-old Malaysian has bagged a number of awards including for best documentary director at the 6th Malaysian Oskar Award for a series called “My Roots”, and best TV documentary for “Malaysia My Home — Story of Sabah & Sarawak” at the Anugerah Seri Angkasa 2010.
The trailer of "The New Village" has been playing at cinemas in the Klang Valley since a year ago but only drew heated response from Malaysians recently.
Many have taken to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube where they savaged the film for its purportedly racist tone and alleged “glorification” of communist guerilla fighters here during the Emergency years that lasted from 1948 to 1960.
An estimated 500,000 Chinese in the country, then called Malaya, had been moved into new villages from 1950 as part of the colonial British government’s security efforts to curb the spread of communism after World War Two.
Malaya achieved independence on August 31, 1957.
The online storm over the film appeared to have been raging since a 2:20-minute clip was posted onto video-sharing site YouTube last June 5, but an op-ed piece in yesterday’s Mingguan Malaysia rebuking the movie’s makers may have inflamed passions further.
