Full Circle
The award-winning Malaysian director Chong Keat Aun was a youth who lived a simpler life, surrounded by the lush paddy fields of Kedah and the local stories that would soon shape his entire career as a filmmaker
Malaysian director Chong Keat Aun shares how his award-winning debut film was the result of a 17-year journey
Clutching his award for best new director after the reveal of his first-ever feature film, The Story of Southern Islet, with both hands, Chong Keat Aun’s voice was tremulous as he began his acceptance speech on the night of the 57th Golden Horse Awards, which took place just last year on November 21st in Taipei, Taiwan. “Movies themselves aren’t extraordinary. In fact, what’s most extraordinary are the people who made them happen,” he begins.
THE STORY OF SOUTHERN ISLET
Set amidst the backdrop of an idyllic countryside in Alor Setar, Kedah during the 1980s, Chong’s debut film tells the story of Yan, a woman desperately seeking a cure for her husband Cheong, who, after quarrelling with a neighbour, suddenly falls ill and spits a bloodied, rusty nail. According to the director, the premise of the film had been based on his own childhood events at the age of 10; particularly, the vivid memory of when his own father had succumbed to an unknown, incurable disease that left him weak and bedridden for almost a year.
“Nothing we did could explain what he was sick with, or how he’d gotten it in the first place,” the now 42-year-old explains. “At the time, clinics weren’t readily accessible, and I remember my mother just trying her best to help him get better because my father was so sick that he couldn’t even get up—every day, she’d wake up at 6am, paddle the bicycle to the morning market to sell anchovies, rush back home in the afternoon to cook lunch, take care of my father, then she’d be out the door again to look for help. She never stopped to rest. In the end, when there was no other way, she went in search for Chinese or Malay bomohs.”
In awe of his mother’s determination and inspired by the local folklore he’d grown up with at the time, Chong had wanted to convey a quintessentially Malaysian tale while sharing the journey of a woman so dedicated to her family. Jojo Goh, who plays Yan in the film, echoed the very same sentiment when she first read the script. “Because the role was written with the director’s mother as a blueprint and the story based on his real-life experiences, it was rather stressful.
I wanted to do those memories justice by bringing them to life, so I needed to understand what was going through her head at the time, the extent of her love for her family as she willingly changes her perception and becomes open to believing in the spiritual.”
ONE OF A KIND
It was this element of spiritualism and mysticism however, that got five parts of the film’s dialogue muted as well as its subtitles removed—all of which were scenes that involved wayang kulit gedek,a shadow-puppet play native to the state. And to Chong’s bemusement, he’d gotten the message just two nights before he received the award.
“Other than (the film) being about my mother, it was really about the people in Kedah and their culture,” he reveals. “Their way of life, the taboos or rituals they had when it came to their paddy fields, the languages they spoke and the local legends they believed in, like the deity in Gunung Keriang my mother took me to pray to when my father was still ill. “As to why there was an issue raised about the
wayang kulit gedek, well... regardless of how intrinsically tied it is to the Malaysian Siamese culture of the region, I suppose it was because it veered too much
“I’ve always liked to say, ‘local is global’, because the reality of it is this: no one else can tell your story better than you do. And that’s what international film festivals are looking for” — CHONG KEAT AUN
into religious territory due to it featuring epic Hindu literature such as Ramayana and Mahabharata.”
Luckily for Chong, when the Film Directors’ Association of Malaysia caught wind of it, they came to the director’s defense, determining those scenes as vital in informing audiences about a fastfading art form important to Malaysia’s cultural history and acknowledging the film’s impact across international waters, having been declared best film by the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema, the International Federation of Film Critics and the Istanbul Film Awards in Turkey.
When asked about the state of the Malaysian film scene, he shares that the limited number of genres Malaysian filmmakers are boxed into can only take them so far, as there wasn’t much room for originality or growth. “I’ve always liked to say, ‘local is global,’” he muses. “Because the reality of it is this: no one else can tell your story better than you do. And that’s what international film festivals are looking for—films that are unique to the filmmaker’s own country as well as themselves, because there’s nothing else like it. So, while aspirations to win an award-winning film are fine and all, I think the first step to actually getting seen as filmmakers is that we have to be brave when we tell our stories.”
FADING VOICES
And Chong endeavours to continue sharing his own; having recorded over 400 interviews that stemmed from his first-ever passion project, ‘The Classic Accents’, which began in 2005 and ended in 2017 in an effort to preserve local dialects through his radio broadcasting segment. Chong says that he simply hopes to one day be able to use his platform in filmmaking to further aid the cultural heritages of Malaysia.
His sophomore film, Snow in Midsummer, is in the works. Based on a true story of a 1950s Cantonese Opera troupe based in Malaysia, the director had wanted to shed some light on the dying art of Chinese Opera and his love for it—an interest piqued by his grandmothers from both sides of the family, as his maternal grandmother was a Teochiew opera singer herself while his paternal one had a fondness for Cantonese opera.
“I’ve long made my peace with the fact that not everyone will accept or understand my work,” Chong says, recalling those days of receiving complaints the first time he aired his project on the radio in 2005, as people thought the folksongs he’d shared were ‘noisy’. “I don’t mind it at all, because I love what I do, it isn’t so much as a job as it is a hobby I’m serious about. And I think, so long as I keep persevering, those stories as well as its people won’t disappear or be forgotten.”