I recently gave an interview on the subject of the upcoming Sarawak Millennium Film Festival in my capacity of Festival Advisor. What does a Festival Advisor do? Well, he helps to pick the movies, he gives interviews and, most importantly, he gets a free plane ticket to Kuching!
The interviewer looked at the list of confirmed films and gasped: “Why are some of them only 10 minutes long?” I said that, since the focus of the festival is independent and student films, it would be apposite to give due emphasis to short films. The interviewer then asked what a short film was.
Well, the entertainment journalist’s bemusement was perhaps not totally unexpected. Short films are not given nearly enough exposure in Malaysia. Unlike in Western countries, there are no TV outlets to air them. Unlike the Oscars, which it otherwise tries so hard to imitate while failing every time, our own Festival Filem Malaysia has no category for shorts.
Unlike the case with most developed countries, our top directors got their breaks not through their early short films but through their early TV dramas. The rationale – and it’s not a totally false one – is that long-form projects will give an indication as to whether a person has the ability and stamina to sustain audience interest for 90 minutes. But Steven Spielberg, Roman Polanski, George Lucas, Abbas Kiaroatami, Martin Scorsese and David Lynch are just six men who honed their visions and visual style through shorts. There is even a compilation video called Lumiere et Compaqnie in which the world’s top directors were given an opportunity to make shorts (52 seconds long!) to commemorate the centenary of cinema. It’s an awesome sight to see people who are used to big-scale storytelling to return to the root of world cinema and also, for the most part, their own.
There has not been much effort to develop the culture of short film-making here. The National Film Development Agency (Finas) does give out grants for them, but as far as I know only two people have received the allocated RM30,000 in the past decade. I would love to hear a comprehensive instruction from Finas on how to get hold of this money, as its website is oddly silent on the subject.
It should be noted that RM30,000 is only necessary if you are planning on shooting and finishing a film on 16mm. If you work with video, have a few friends who can help out, and know how to use editing software, the cost can be brought to below RM1,000. Five of James Lee’s shorts – starting from the crime pastiche “Ah Yu’s Story” (1998) right up to the rigorously aesthetic “Beautiful Man” (2001) were made this way and they will be screened at this year’s Singapore International Film Festival in addition to his two features “Snipers” and “Ah Beng Returns”. This is the first time in the festival’s 15-year history that a single Malaysian director has been represented with as many as seven works. Who needs money when you have chutzpah?
Even if you do not find Lee’s work to your taste, there have been other good ones over the years. Some of them, like R. Daven’s “My Father & His Celluloid”, K. Shanmugan’s “No Worry Chicken Curry” and Osman Ali’s “Anak Halal” have been garlanded at the Malaysian Video Awards. All three of them are graduates of our only film school, Akademi Filem Malaysia. There are others like Ho Yuhang, Desmond Ng and Yee Hwa who make piles of money from advertising and then channel some of their technical know-how and philosophical musings into altogether more personal projects. Ng’s “Latin’s House” in particular is a beautiful and stimulating 18-minute video journal about a trip to Bali with no dialogue but plenty of text. Sarawak-born Linus Chung’s “Demolition Frog” is a painstaking and often very charming 10-minute animated work, created with more gung-ho spirit than cash, which will be shown at a festival in France in March.
A short film is anything less than an hour, and so they are about concision. Since they don’t cost so much, there is less pressure to conform to this vague monolithic entity called “the mass audience”, a capitalist construct with an attendant and rarely contested set of preferences and limitations. It’s a good and time-tested way in which to find a voice; one would think this would be especially urgent in a film community such as ours, which is so lacking in individual voices and creative risks. It’s also curiously fitting that the only South-East Asian movie to ever win an award at Cannes (which is the Holy Grail as far as some of our film observers are concerned) is Raymond Red’s short “Anino.”
The local short that will likely get a lot of attention in the next few months is Osman Ali’s “Malaikat di Jendela,” slated to open the Sarawak fest. This 30-minute film was made possible by a RM80,000 grant from Finas, given as the first prize in one category at the Malaysian Video Awards.
It stars the bona fide celeb Ning Baizura, who took enough time off from recording and various scandals to support it. I guess the thinking behind the strategy is: You want stars, we’ll give you a star! It also has the participation of some of our top creative talents, such as cinematographer Teoh Gay Hian and production designer Yee I-Lann, who had proven their worth on big-budget features. The previous work of all the people involved leaves us with high expectations for this film. But I hope that audiences will continue to be intrigued even when the only star involved in a short is. the short itself.
THE END.
First Published: 14.01.2002 on Kakiseni