Love your capital
> Project aimed to revive local pride and ignite love for KL city
Astranger leaves his home in Kuala Lumpur hours before dawn breaks over the horizon to distribute stacks of newspapers around the city, eventually returning to pick his young son to drop him off at school, and finally returning home for some much needed shut eye.
Interspersed throughout the “footage” are vignettes of others in the capital city, with similar lifestyles, going about their daily routines to prepare for what daylight would bring – from a worker baking pastries for the day’s sale, to Hindu devotees performing dawn prayers.
Upon screening his nearly-four-minutelong short titled Night Lives Night Loves, Dain Said explained that the short film was meant to depict “How some people work at night, so that we can work in the day”. The short would serve as a prelude to the launch of “Kuala Lumpur, I Love You”, also known as “KL I Love You”.
As part of the global Cities of Love initiative that began with Emmanuel Benbihy’s Paris, je t’aime and New York, I Love You films, critically-acclaimed Malaysian writer-director Dain was tasked with spearheading the community initiative aimed to revive local pride and rekindle or spur the love Malaysians have deep in their hearts, for their city.
“The diversity of Malaysian culture, her people, their lives, our memories and the history of KL; the many stories that intersect within our lives, I felt this was really something we could bring to the table and to this global movement,” the director of Bunohan and Interchange said.
Through the art of storytelling, KL I Love You will highlight the collective experiences of our beloved city; the urban spaces; migration and movement; differences and diversity; history and memories; fascination with the supernatural and superstitious; stories of love and relationships; and more.
During a panel discussion, author Bernice Chauly responded to moderator Umapagan Ampikaipakan’s question on how the community initiative will influence KL residents to get up and share their stories of love for their city. Her answer it would require a concerted effort from all parties.
“People who work in film, those who are teachers; it is everyone. It is past time that children know we need a sense of place. This is a city. It is alive, it breathes and it has stories. It is going to take a lot of work,” Bernice elaborated.
Though the specifics of the initiative are still being looked into and the finer details are on the drawing board and being ironed out, the end goal will be the culmination of a KL I Love You anthology, a film that will join the likes of Paris, je t’aime, at the same time enhance love for our capital and instil a sense of city pride.
There is no denying that exciting times are ahead for those whose mind is already churning out ideas, and others who can’t wait to be part of the initiative, particularly film lovers, and its subject matter – Kuala Lumpur, the cosmopolitan national capital of Malaysia.
The KL I Love You initiative is in the pipeline. Interested parties can log on to www.kliloveyou.com to find out more.