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IN
MALAY & THAI WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES
Genre: Documentary
Director: Amir Muhammad
RunTime: 1 hr 12 mins
Released By: Cathay-Keris Films
Rating: NC-16 (Content Not Suitable for Children)
Official Website: http://www.dahuangpictures.com/blogs/index.php?blog=7
Opening
Day: The Picturehouse Showcase - from 10 May
Synopsis
:
In the propaganda war against the Communist Party
of Malaya (CPM), much was made of the fact that the party
comprised ethnic Chinese who adopted an atheistic political
philosophy. This tactic proved effective as the country was
mainly Malay and Muslim. However, a large and influential
division of the CPM comprised Malay-Muslims. This documentary
is a portrait of life in a tranquil South Thailand village,
complete with mosque, where the retired members live in exile.
But recollections of the decades-long guerrilla war keep breaking
up into a fictional Thai radio drama.…
Movie
Review:
History
lessons - boy, do I hate them. But thanks to movies, and more
importantly, documentaries, I have learnt what I needed to
know from these visual presentations of what happened in the
past.
I know
I’d be inviting scorns from the truly intelligent readers
out there when I say this: Who needs books when you have films?
Amir Muhammad
has done me a favour by producing this documentary about a
group of retired Malay-Muslim communist members who live in
South Thailand. While I did not even know about the existence
of these nice old folks, the Malaysian filmmaker has circled
in on a few of them to tell stories of how these exiled Malays
are living their lives now.
To make
things a little more interesting, the 72-minute picture is
interspersed with a voiceover storytelling of Shakespeare’s
A Winter Tale.
Those
who are familiar with Muhammad’s biography will know
that his previous documentary The Last Communist (2006) also
featured interesting song and dance sequences between a travelogue-like
film about Chin Peng, the exiled leader of the banned Communist
Party of Malaya.
And both
these films are banned in his homeland Malaysia.
However,
while Muhammad’s last picture entertained, this one
merely aroused interest for a while. The distracting radio
signals which acted as transitions were somehow out of place
too.
The intellectual
may attempt to decipher what the radio drama is trying say
with its sensitive political backdrop, but everything is up
to interpretations – hey, it may just be a gimmick to
fill up the film’s runtime.
The visuals
are nothing awe-inspiring or attractive, but simply a straightforward
depiction of what is going on in the villages in South Thailand.
A nice
thing about this documentary is the collage of familiar images
presented on screen. Kampungs, coconut trees, adorable Malay
kids and wrinkled old man babbling about their past: you’d
wonder what kind of threat these people posed to the country?
Also,
the picture presents a common-folk’s point of view.
There is no aggression or angst to spice up the touchy topic.
It simply wants to tell us there are different ways of telling
a story.
Just
like how there are different ways of learning history.
Movie
Rating:
Review by John Li
(The
documentary gives history idiots like me an insight of what
happened in the past, but there is nothing in-depth to make
it exceptional)
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