Australian Malaysian Film Festival: Promoting tourism via feature films

The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Sun, 08/26/2007 1:37 PM | Life

Dewi Anggraeni, Contributor, Melbourne

Tourism promotion is big business with a high profile.

In some countries it even takes precedent over many equally worthwhile projects and causes, yet the degree of its success depends very much on the combined chemistry of the sustained effort on the part of government and the private sector, and the resourcefulness of those involved in organizing the campaign.

Malaysia has shown its creativeness in the latter.

2007 being Visit Malaysia Year, the country's authority on tourism, Tourism Malaysia, has embraced its film industry and sponsored the first Australian Malaysian Film Festival, a boutique event that took place on the weekend of Aug. 18/19. It was staged at Melbourne's premier venue for film events, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), another sponsor, along with other partners such as The Asian Executive.

Designers of tourism promotion try to outdo each other in producing the most memorable campaign by appealing to people's various senses, such as culinary and gourmanderie, glamour, adventure, aesthetic and even ethics.

Short films directly featuring places to visit have copiously been used, yet rarely have real feature films been incorporated into the campaign the way Melbourne's Australian Malaysian Film Festival has successfully accomplished.

Three high-quality films were shown. The first, The Red Kebaya, is the winner of four Malaysian Festival Awards, then came Chermin, a suspense supernatural horror film, the first Malaysian film to be screened at the Puchon International Fantasy Film Festival in Korea in July.

Closing the festival was Puteri Gunung Ledang, winner of multiple awards, telling a story based on, and drawn from the Tale of Hang Tuah, a famous Malay historical epic.

None of the films explicitly exhorts people to visit Malaysia, yet many in the audience quietly planned trips to the country after seeing the first film, picking up promotional brochures strategically placed on the tables outside the cinema, despite having been handed a colourful bag of ""goodies"" by the organizers.

Compelling story and settings

Produced by L'Agenda Productions, The Red Kebaya, featuring a multiracial cast, is set and shot in the most picturesque spots in Malaysia. The story weaves around the protagonist, a professionally successful photographer Latiff (played by Ramli Hassan), whose preoccupation is to take images from old, dilapidated and abandoned old houses.

Curiously, each time he goes to these places, they seem to come alive with sounds and noises which only he is able to hear.

Sometimes he even glimpses snippets of scenes that quickly dissipate, leaving him feeling he has been day-dreaming.

In one of the media interviews his agent arranges, however, Latiff theorizes that he believes the walls of these old buildings are trying to tell stories of events occuring in the times they were still being used.

Having been haunted for some time by images of a red kebaya (a Malay and Indonesian blouse usually worn with traditional sarongs) and two children playing with a blue kite, Latiff becomes distracted, causing his agent some concern. He then decides to embark on a trip, driving to wherever his intuition leads him.

He arrives in Penang, and after checking in a beautiful period hotel, begins to wander around with his camera, taking pictures.

He chances into a antique shop where he comes across an old photograph, showing a stately house. He asks the shop owner where the house is, and the owner tells him it is just outside Penang, and that it is now (you guessed it!) abandoned and badly dilapidated, with tramps and drug addicts as occasional squatters.

Latiff is very disturbed because he is sure he has been in that house, yet as far as he knows, he has never been to Penang.

The shop owner then shows him another item, an old, battered suitcase that he found in the house. Latiff promptly buys the photo and the suitcase and heads for the hotel where, opening the suitcase, he finds even more disturbing photos.

After a restless night populated with weird dreams, Latiff goes and finds the house. It is just as the antique shop owner has described, but as Latiff steps into it, the house comes alive, transporting him back decades into the past.

A story, as if unravelling from inside him, fills the space. He follows the scenes to different places in the same temporal sphere, and at the end, realizes that the little boy in the story was himself, and the beautiful woman, the owner of the red kebaya, was his late mother, Azizah (played by Vanidah Imran), killed by thugs hired by the estranged but vengeful wife of her British admirer.

While the plot seems uncomplicated, the story itself recalls the unpleasant situation around the time of Malaysia's independence in 1957, where most of the big businesses were under foreign control.

It depicts how foreigners -- in this case, British -- treated the locals with undisguised contempt; John Reynolds, Azizah's admirer, played by Bob Mercer, was an exception.

Mercer was then regarded as too ""easy-going"" with his local staff, thus he stands out among compatriots, including his racist and social-climber wife Davinia, played by Samantha Schubert.

In order not to upset cultural sensibilities, there are no physical scenes between Mercer and Azizah.

The effective use of both Malay and English enhances the flow of the story. And the tension only serves to make it more memorable to the audience, while of course, the beautiful settings are inevitably etched in the memory, providing an impetus for the interested audience to go and see the places for themselves.

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