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©The Sun (Used by permission)
by Danny Lim

There was a point in the 1970s that destroyed public belief so much so that nevermind the non-Malays, even Malays were saying they wouldn’t watch Malay movies,” says actor-director Afdlin Shauki. “With better films and funkier cinemas today, we are at the brink of regaining the trust of the Malaysian public to come back to cinemas.”

The Malaysian film industry, from having just four local films released in 1999 to 48 films being produced this year (over 30 films slated for release), owes its revival to an alignment of many little things.

Over the last decade, the rise of the cineplex created a willing captive market of mall-rat youths. Foreign competition, rampant piracy and satellite TV educated audiences to expect global standards in cinema, forcing the industry to inject new blood.

Consumer-priced digital technology shaved costs and nurtured a non-mainstream filmmaking scene. The critical successes of these so-called “independents” at film festivals drew international attention to Malaysia, and raised expectations for creativity and quality in the mainstream.

Big corporations like Astro and Media Prima invested and produced more films to pump more local content into their media channels. This coincided with a discernible, if still contentious, degree of restraint in film censorship. If nothing else, the censors’ hesitance saw a sudden glut of local horror movies over the past three years. As the industry grows, more daring filmmakers come into the fold challenging narrow notions of “national cinema”.

The greater concern for the industry’s future though lies in the infrastructure, support mechanisms and the numbers to sustain the current growth spurt.

“For Malay movies, the total audience today is about 300,000, so we manage our costs around that number,” says Ahmad Puad Onah, president of the Malaysian Film Producers’ Association and general manager of Grand Brilliance, a subsidiary of Media Prima.

The challenge will be to reach out to non-Malay audiences, and older age segments, especially families, thus encouraging more varied storytelling. “We’re following in the steps of Korea, with love stories being our strength,” Puad says. “We cannot afford to produce high-budget movies involving action or CGI (computer-generated imagery).”

The squeeze is harder on smaller players like Red Films, producer of 2005’s Gol & Gincu. Managing director Lina Tan says for every box office ringgit, 25% goes to entertainment tax, refundable only to certified Malay language films. The balance is split 50-50 between exhibitor and producer, not including a distributing fee. Keeping productions solvent requires secondary revenue from TV and video sales, overseas markets or a spin-off into TV series, like Gol & Gincu did.

Realising that local films can share similar target markets, companies like telcos have also hooked up with productions for product placement and sponsorships, provide content for mobile downloads, and use the film’s intellectual property (eg trademark characters) to peddle products.

Metrowealth CEO David Teo, the most prolific producer in the business, dislikes the risk of corporate partners strong-arming control over marketing. Metrowealth’s target market are non-urban audiences, so Teo keeps his marketing lo-fi, focusing on star-vehicle road tours.

Teo knows the market for these cheap, often low-brow films. “If you want to appeal to the kampung, you must have a popular artiste,” says Teo. “For urban, your concept must be strong. They don’t see artistes, they look for filmmaking quality.”

He produced the horror flick Jangan Pandang Belakang, which broke the record for the highest-grossing Malaysian film ever this year.

The long-term outlook for the industry will strictly be driven by economics, which determines content. Most funding and support will go to what makes the most money.

Audiences in Malaysia, like anywhere else, go to cinemas mainly to be entertained, so the genres of horror, action, romance and comedy will remain cinematic staples.

Where the “independents” are more than peripheral to the industry has been in the power and plurality of their stories. But they have yet to make sense of it financially, says Tan. The challenge for such filmmakers is to engage their audience, and to do so sustainably.

In dealing with investors, corporate partners and distributors, filmmakers have to get the most money for their film, and the most strategic marketing to attract the right audience. Financing is tricky unless a big studio foots the bill. Banks resist funding films, and even with the National Film Development Corporation (Finas)’s Fiction Film Loan Scheme, production and auxiliary support is lacking.

Skim Wajib Tayang (a compulsory screening scheme) is a “double-edged sword” for producers says Afdlin. It forces cinemas to screen local films in the biggest halls for a week. Competitors slug it out to avoid release dates during Hollywood blockbuster season, while exhibitors get impatient with slow-selling films affecting their bottomlines.

Navigating censorship is fraught with uncertainty, especially when Film Censorship Board (LPF) decisions can be overturned by media and political will. Non-Malay language films are further squeezed by not benefiting from Wajib Tayang or the Entertainment Tax rebate, discouraging non-Malay voices and audiences. The odds remain stacked in favour of the lightweight, star-vehicle, Malay language genre flick.
Anwardi Jamil, filmmaker and son of industry veteran Datuk Jamil Sulong, hoped that non-mainstream voices could sustain themselves to counter the warped “selective memory” of commercial cinema.

“What we see in Malay cinema are now images that are not real but what certain authorities want us to believe to be real,” he said at the 2005 Asian Film Symposium.

Moviegoers are cottoning on to this, even at Metrowealth’s end of the market. “(Audiences) now want more real to life stories,” says Teo. “If you have police (characters), they don’t want police who are very good like in Gerak Khas.”

Supposedly more “real-to-life” stories like Yasmin Ahmad’s films and the “indies” have been attacked for purportedly creating less than muhibbah images of Malaysia, that did not fit a homogenous ideal of who we should be; but these filmmakers would claim they tried to show who we really are.

The vehemence of these attacks betray concerns that these films have traction, that their alternative views might actually be accepted by local viewers and infuse the mainstream. Sepet and Gubra not only made decent change at the box office, but engaged its audience intelligently, and attracted multi-ethnic audience at that. “Our definition of Malaysian cinema is as narrow as our definition of who we are,” says Tan. “It all comes down to identity.”

Danny Lim is senior writer at Off the Edge. He has also made a short award-winning documentary.

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