-INTRODUCTION -
Movie and spectacle maker Liew Seng Tat's most recent endeavour, Projek Angkat Rumah, saw over 200 volunteers transporting, via their collective muscle and ingenuity, a kampung house from Sekolah Kebangsaan Sentul Utama into the KLPAC grounds for Urbanscapes 2010.
It was inspired by the traditional practice "where villagers unite to help carry and move an old house to its new location". For Angkat Rumah, there were lion dancers, a funeral band, and midgets in sombreros -- and a kenduri and tikam-tikam session when the toil was over. Loads of fun.
While he has struck out on a unique trajectory, Seng Tat is arguably a chronological and thematic successor to beloved filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad. Like Kak Yasmin, he's a dreamer. But what's the state of the Malaysian Dream, nowadays?
So, it's been one year since Yasmin's death. While little has been done to mark this anniversary, there were small overtures in this direction last weekend: an exhibition called In Her Own Words: A Celebration of Humanity and Universal Love, by graphic designer Kevin Bathman; a special episode of BFM89.9's I Love KL culture show, which broadcast recorded lectures by Yasmin and interviews with the people who knew her; the screening of Yasmin's films at the funeral of another close friend, film critic and academic Benjamin McKay.
I remember Benjamin, at a quiet dinner party in memory of Yasmin last year, tipsily describing how Yasmin's films had so touched his students. Indeed it had. Due to her work on Hari Raya commercials, the phrase "PETRONAS ad" has special meaning to any Malaysian. KLue awarded one of our 20 Under 40 spots for 2008 to Tan Hong Ming and Umi Qazrina, the young stars of one of Yasmin's most beloved PETRONAS ads.
Her films travelled the international festival circuit, got wide releases in Malaysia, and (most surprisingly) returned a decent amount of receipts. The films also drew the ire of conservatives: Sepet for its interracial love; Gubra for promoting "fenomena songsang"; Muallaf for sporting Sharifah Amani with a shaved head.
Outcry from these closed minds were so loud precisely because Yasmin's films reached average Malaysians, and presented them with a place where Muslim/non-Muslim couples were allowed get together, husbands did cook for their families, and women could have short hair. Some critics decried Yasmin for being "trapped in her own dreamworld of ideals", rightly pointing out that her celluloid Malaysia did not exist -- but they missed the point. In dreaming on-camera, Yasmin allowed us all to dream of a better world.
(Sneaky book recommendation: Amir Muhammad's Yasmin Ahmad's Films, which critically examines her oeuvre, now in its second edition! Pick it up. It's good.)
Where are we, a year on? Women have been caned for drinking alcohol. It's okay for gay or transsexual characters to be portrayed in Malaysian film -- as long as they die or repent. 1Malaysia-style projects like ASTRO MyStory channel Yasmin's aesthetic -- but whether they will capture her political-agenda-less vision remains to be seen. The Malaysian Dream is full of psychoses.
But I think we Malaysians are still dreaming -- and going further, beyond Yasmin's fantasies.
Yasmin's films always preached that our racial and cultural differences were not a barrier to human empathy, true; but the differences were ever-present, and treated with significance and subtlety.
Yet, in Seng Tat's work, for example, the social, cultural and religious differences between Malaysians are lampooned as the constructs they are. There is his uproarious short, Halal, which pokes fun at how Islamic food restrictions have riven our culture far beyond the needs of piety:
Angkat Rumah began with Seng Tat delivering a short spiel about how "we are Malaysian first."
But that was it. No hand-wringing. One year on, that's the state of the Malaysian Dream that Yasmin helped shape: a diverse people, capable of seriously examining the boundaries that divide us. But also able to not be angsty about it -- to take it as a given, and go on being merely Malaysian. We are a disparate set of "villagers" uniting to move Malaysia to where it can be. That's not a bad dream at all.
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