Thursday, July 12, 2012

Recent Conversations

Interviewer: Name two of your strengths and two of your weaknesses. 

Deepak Menon: I'd start from my strengths. My greatest strength is my family and friends. 

Interviewer: That's not your strength. Please state your personal strength. 

Deepak Menon: I stand with my views. My family and friends are my greatest strength. It takes a lot of hard work and years to build relationships. Who we often hang out with and our upbringing reflects our character and attitude towards life. I'm grateful for my awesome friends, my parents, my siblings and my wife. They have stood by me sharing my life crisis and good times. They are my source of inspiration and motivation. 

Deepak Menon: My second strength is my talents. I'm grateful to GOD for the blessings. My talent has given me the strength to be very resilient during challenging times. I take pride in my work and have the courage to be. 

Deepak Menon: My biggest weakness is Trust. In the past, I have trust and accepted people very easily. Life has taught me that some people we encounter can be very judgmental and lack honor. However, I'm a perpetual student and acknowledge that there are more good-willed people around us.   

Deepak Menon: My second weakness is my education. I hold a BSc. Media Arts & Science (Film & Animation) and Master of Business Administration (General Management) from MMU, Cyberjaya, Malaysia. I was neither intelligent to earn a scholarship nor financially capable to afford a Harvard MBA. It would have made a very big difference to my life and career. However, I'm grateful to be educated by some great teachers from MMU. I hope to pursue my PhD in the areas of Economics and Social Sciences. The PhD study fees from a reputable university is very costly. I have a thirst for knowledge and hope to receive  some kind of scholarship. 


Interviewer: You have 11 years in the education industry and experiences producing award winning works. Don't they contribute more than a Harvard MBA?

Deepak Menon: It took me 11 years to pursue and complete my masters. There is a saying, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."



Thursday, March 15, 2012

Q&A With Deepak Menon On Cross-Over Cinema

Q&A With Deepak Menon On Cross-Over Cinema 
Email conversation dated: 15th March 2012
 
"Bollywood film as geo-regional and geo-cultural product in Malaysian media market" 
by Rohini Sreekumar, Research Scholar, Monash University

Rohini: Do you think that the Bollywood films are influencing the Malay film industry? How?

Deepak: Yes, during P Ramlee’s era, at a certain extent.
The current Malay film industry gains reference from many industries including the US, India, Indonesia, Korea, Thai, Hong Kong, Japan, Europe.

Rohini: There is a huge inflow of DVDs (pirated and original) of Bollywood films now in Malaysia even though Box office report says that Bollywood films capture huge revenue from Malaysian theatres.  What is your opinion regarding this?

Deepak: The current (2011) box-office data as follows:
1.     Largest Hollywood movie released in Malaysia, Transformers 3 USD10mill.
2.     Largest Malay movie released in Malaysia, KL Gangster USD4mill.
3.     Largest Kollywood movie released in Malaysia, Endhiran USD3mill.
There is opportunity for a thriving Bollywood scene none the less.


Rohini: What are the concerns that Bollywood films place when considering the cultural, social and religious aspect?

Deepak: Bollywood movies are more concerned about their homeland Indian audience.

Rohini:
Who do you think are the audiences of these Bollywood movies?(since Malaysia is a multi-ethnic country)why?

Deepak: All walks of audience. Leisure and entertainment activity.

Rohini: With the popularity of Bollywood films (or Indian films) in Malaysia, do you believe that there are wider chances of forming cross-over films in Malaysia?

Deepak:
Yes. There is always great opportunity for cross-over films at any part of the world.

Rohini: Inspired from the Indian films, some Malaysian directors are venturing into making Tamil movies based on local themes.  How do you appraise these cross-over ventures?

Deepak: Directors are inspired by many films from many parts of the world. In fact, many Indian directors are inspired by US films and vice-versa. Inspiration for producers boils down to two significant reasoning; box office success or award winning story.

Rohini: Do you find that these kinds of film ventures pose huge challenge considering the Malaysian film laws and regulations (like the use of national language)?  

Deepak: Absolutely humongous challenge. It is more likely for a Malay language movie cross-over venture with content producers from India. eg, The movie Cinta by Kabir Bhatia.


END. 

Monday, February 27, 2012

Foreword

Moving Forward with Hope, Dreams, Anticipation, and Continuous Self Improvement

A brand new blog!

What's great about a new year is that it looks backward and forward, and we are truly blessed to have so much to look back on and so much excitement to anticipate.

Another year passes filled with memories, experiences, falling downs, getting back ups and the strength to move along.

The past years has given the gift of many shared memories to last a lifetime, a timely call for contemplation and reflections. The past years brought many hopes.

Hope for continued support and exposure for our humble film works, namely Chemman Chaalai (The Gravel Road), and Chalanggai (Dancing Bells). Both Malaysian Indian community films have brought us tremendous exposure and support - home and abroad. It has shown us that humility, sincerity, and hard work never goes unnoticed.

Hope for research journal publications for further global integration, cultural value sharing, and knowledge sharing.

Hope for a renewed and progressive development in achieving excellence in the field of photo journalism. We have now grown to a team of eight consisting of photographers and designers to offer our commitment and personalized consultation for our growing demands from clients.

All these success could have only been possible with the support from all the beautiful souls who has showered us with blessings and encouragement to further our voyage in the amazing world of Academics, Filmmaking, and Photo Journalism.

I have come to accept what you are able to do and not able to do. Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it. Learn to forgive yourself and forgive others. Not to assume that it’s too late to get involved.

I’ve decided I’m going to live – or at least try to live - the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humor, with composure.

I wish to extend my very sincere best wishes and hope to receive continuous support from our valued clients, dearest community members, loving family, and awesome friends towards our on going effort to achieve our new year's resolution.

May the year two thousand and twelve bring loads of cheer, buckets of love and peace through out the year and beyond.

Speak soon!


Contact
DEEPAK KUMARAN MENON
Email: deepak.kumaran.menon@gmail.com
Blog: deepakmenon888.blogspot.com



Monday, May 24, 2010

Article Archive: The Edge Financial Daily (Monday, 24 May 2010)

The Edge Financial Daily 
In Conversation:
Lights, Camera, Action!

Written by Anandhi Gopinath
Monday, 24 May 2010 00:00

Our commercial and independent filmmakers are as different as they come. Yet their quest is the same — to tell Malaysian stories. Veteran actor/producer/director Hans Isaac and up-and-coming indie filmmaker Deepak Menon give us a clear picture of what separates the work they do, the art of storytelling, the many challenges they face in telling the Malaysian story and the not-so-bright future they see for local cinema.

Malaysia has had quite a successful commercial film industry for many years now. The past decade, however, has seen a burgeoning independent film industry that has been winning multiple awards in film festivals all over the world. As different as they are, both our commercial and indie films have a similar purpose: to tell Malaysian stories.

Veteran actor/producer/director Hans Isaac and up-and-coming indie filmmaker Deepak Menon come from opposite ends of the spectrum yet share many similarities in their filmmaking quest, most importantly to express themselves and seek acceptance of their creative self-expression.

They share with us their thoughts on making movies for the Malaysian audience, their experiences and hope for the future.

 
Anandhi Gopinath: Let’s start with this question: what exactly is a Malaysian movie or a Malaysian story?

Hans Issac: It’s movies about what we know. It’s about not putting boundaries, saying I don’t have to make what has always been made. If it’s a very normal script that I get, I would accept this half but I would ask them to tweak it, but don’t do it the way their market wants it. What’s the hook of your story? Then, you must put the hook in a clever, compelling context.

When I put together Cuci, the goal was to show the access to opportunity no matter where you come from. Don’t be lazy, take the opportunity and something good will come of it. Even if you don’t succeed, you’re still further from where you started.

Deepak Menon: I think all stories — fictional, narrative or history — are an experience shared. The vision of the writer’s writings, the director’s visuals and the music composer’s rhythm pass through the audience’s mind for interpretation. The value of that experience is perceived by the audience, which is then guided by their belief systems, attitudes, acceptable community customs, past experiences, perception of reality and even their sensitivity to the subject matter.

As Malaysians, we are exposed to many sets of culture and belief systems due to our rich demographic cultural density and vast historical origins. So capturing tacit knowledge becomes an important ingredient for originality.

As a storyteller, the challenge is then to identify the most common and mundane experiences and share and deliver them in a less forceful and intimidating manner. Subtlety, sensitivity, respect and community responsibility play important roles in a country like ours. Remember, Asian cultures encourage the use of less offensive written, verbal and non-verbal communication methods.

The perception is that international content should copy Hollywood and Bollywood content as they seem very successful. But you have to realise that they are successful because they promote original storytelling that focuses on the development of their national content.

A Malaysian story has to be reflective of and responsive to the uniqueness of the integrated Malaysian culture, social cultural environment and the business environment, support the national agenda, represent the people’s voices, and at the same time, contribute to the national content and talent industry and strive to promote shared values internationally.

 
Deepak, your two movies, Chemman Chaalai and Chalanggai, were really good and successful too. It’s a big deal for a filmmaker, especially an independent one, to start off his career with not one but two successful movies. How did you do that?

Deepak: I was in television before and to a certain extent, I’ve tried to carry my experience into filmmaking and integrate it. I’ve been carrying cables for a long time — since I was 10 because my dad was in production too. That, plus my observations of the industry … I’m also in film education, that’s my first qualification. My second qualification is in business administration. I also write for academic journals.

I also tried to solve a problem in the industry. The problem I saw was that there was no Indian content! Absolutely none. I looked at this and wondered why people weren’t making any Indian movies. So I met filmmakers from the older generation, like Datuk L Krishnan ... they all told me not to do it. Even those filmmakers making Chinese and Malay movies, they said don’t do it or I will go bankrupt. I took that as a challenge and decided to do it.

The first problem was that there was no local Tamil movie industry to speak of. No talent, no nothing. When you think about India’s Tamil movie industry, they have Rajinikanth and that sort of star power. I didn’t have that here. But I used that as an advantage by reversing the entire order of producing a commercial movie. I targeted 50 to 70-year-olds, and the cinemas told me, no way will old people come and buy tickets. That fell on deaf ears. I also changed the screenplay — nothing like what the Indian filmmakers do. I cast ordinary people in the roles and the cinematography was against the norm too. If you want to break the rules, know them well and break them totally — no halfway business.

I pushed things to the limit with Chemman Chaalai and we went against Finas when they rejected the film because they said: ‘Kamu mencemarkan budaya Malaysia.’ This was back in 2005. But the movie was finally released.

 
Why did Finas reject it initially?
Hans: The guidelines were not clear. I am on the board of the producers’ association of Malaysia. We’ve been working on these guidelines for a while now. That’s why they suddenly said rempits are okay and protesting is okay. We were shooting blindly before and then suddenly we’re told we cannot show this — we can’t go back and reshoot everything.

We’ve never had guidelines because no one was brave enough to put these guidelines down and say, ‘Yes, I think these are good guidelines and let’s put them down.’ You can’t expect the ministry to do this; they will vet what’s already there. Someone has to do it, and we have it now.


Do you think Malaysian audiences get the point of your movies?
Hans: Well I get the point because my movies are straight up and direct (laughs).

Deepak: For me, it’s not a problem … I go for a lot of screenings and weird stuff and I find that any form of art and expression has its audience somehow. People do like my movies and the people I reach out to do enjoy what I make, so it’s great.

Hans: You’ll always have the problem of audiences not quite getting it. Some people will say ‘teruklah’. Some people will say ‘it’s okay’. And some will say, ‘man, I loved it’. Question is, who is your market and are you happy with what you’ve said. That’s most important.

 
Pick one major positive of the evolution of the commercial movie industry.

Hans: It allowed a guy like me, with no vision for filmmaking, to make a movie. And that’s very hard. I knew nothing about movies and I didn’t go to film school. I was acting for years and I sat with editors and directors and I worked my way up. I was an extra, I ‘tapaued’ food and I waited for my time. It allowed me to come here from nothing. I’m a hospitality management grad. How the hell am I making movies?

Content-wise … well, if someone makes a movie that makes RM7 million, people will quickly do the same thing. We should do that. Make a movie based on a passion you have, get it out of your system, then move on. But direct it when you’re ready.


How has content developed in the indie film industry? And how do you form your own content?

Deepak: To be independent, one must not be dependent. There is a need for constant innovation. Innovation here is not only in content creation, but also in the business process, operational process, regulatory system, media innovation, distribution channels, exhibition channels, working structures and, most importantly, financial strategies.

Technology has played a vital role in democratising the creative industry to be able to compete globally. Unlike the traditional filmmaking dictatorial industry, a filmmaker today is capable of dreaming big dreams. While independent filmmakers are limited by their environmental constraints, they have an opportunity to explore and develop strong working models that these slow-moving media giants can only dream of. Small is beautiful and flexibility has become the key.

So yes lah, the content creation process in the independent filmmaking scene is less confined by the capitalist structures but driven towards personal actualisation and community development in building a strong foundation and pushing back the boundaries for future content opportunities and exploration.

In developing my content … well, I leverage opportunities that I see. This is my talent, these are my capabilities, but there are also four factors I always look at: the attractiveness of a story, its durability, its timeliness and if there is a value-added factor. I am a family filmmaker, so nothing too scandalous. I am also a subtle filmmaker — I don’t attack anyone or anything, I’m liberal and I let the audience consume what they want in a movie.

 
The perception of the public — the non-filmmaking crowd — is that commercial filmmakers are only after the money while indie filmmakers are after the creative aspect of filmmaking.

Hans: You have Deepak’s kind of filmmaking and you have my kind, and they are both very different and cater for two different markets. But if we go from this side of the fence to the other side, the strategy changes radically. It’s about marketing, about money and about business.

Every indie director wants to make a commercial film. They have access to money to be able to shoot on different formats, live sounds, really good actors, and the colour grading is better.

Deepak: Filmmaking incorporates a set of creative processes that strategically integrate most, if not all, entertainment industry challenges and transform them into opportunities. Producers, writers, directors, dancers, actors, musicians, visual artists, financiers, distributors, marketers, exhibitors, managerial crews and technical crews come together in a shared vision to transform their aspirations, talents and ideas into a tangible product. And most of the time, there is a borderless crossover effort between commercial and independent artists.

For sustainable growth and to be able to continue producing film works, positive consumption and financial returns from works are inevitable. The difference here is just the working model. The flexible independent filmmaking model enables filmmakers to focus on key issues and aspects that so-called commercial films are restrained from exploring.

There is a desperate need for academics, industry practitioners and government regulatory bodies to re-evaluate  current industry standards. The audiences are limited to consuming what is available. It is the responsibility of the providers to promote the right content to ensure the growth of the national industry.


Would you ever do an indie film?

Hans: Of course! But I won’t spend RM1.8 million on it. I would shoot differently. I would downscale everything and shoot with what we’ve got. One van with everything in it, minimum production team, and the story would be about four people only. No scene with plenty of extras, then I will edit it in my office. I would consider doing this for sure, as long as I have a strong storyline.

A commercial movie takes 35, 40 days to shoot and it’s a huge battalion of people. This huge convoy … my, it’s mental. I’d rather not shoot like that. I’d like to pile everyone in a van and just go and shoot and tell my story. But then again, if everyone in Malaysia watched this movie, it would become a commercial success because it made money.


So you mean the difference between commercial and independent movies is really only the money?

Hans: It comes down to that, definitely.

Deepak: I’ve won awards as an alternative filmmaker, a digital filmmaker, an indie filmmaker …  they keep putting me in boxes. For me, it’s simple — as long as you have a business model and you want to make profits, you have to close shop if that model doesn’t work for you. There is a saying — rich people care about what food looks like, the middle class cares about how many portions at the same price, and the poor want to know if it can keep for a week. When you are working with scarce resources, you learn how to work with what you have and how to make it stretch.

Independent only really means you’re not dependent on anything. No one is there for you and when you fall, you fall on your own.

Hans: I self-fund, but I have backers, so that means I’m not independent. And I pay two actors as much as Deepak’s entire budget. The process of making the film is pretty much the same; it’s just the different budgets and limitations we work with.


Okay, let’s call them mainstream and underground movies then. What else separates the two?

Hans: When it comes to content, there is a great responsibility towards the money that’s put into a movie. When you have RM150,000 in the shape of a grant, the responsibility is less. But for me, when the money comes from my own pocket or my investor’s pocket, the responsibility is greater.

Studios have the best process to create a good story. They will fund nine commercial movies a year and the 10th will be given to an indie director. We’ll let this indie guy do what the hell he wants to do and see if it works. Bigger studios can’t take that risk because the board of directors will say, ‘no, we want 10 commercial movies’.

It depends on the people on top, whether they are willing to take the risk and say, ‘guys, don’t worry, make an indie movie and do what you will with it. Even if it flops, don’t worry, you won’t lose your job’. That’s how Hollywood does it — they make several commercial movies per year and then there’s one that they fund for the heck of it. Studios here don’t think like that. They want all 10 movies to be successful in the same way. No risk, no ‘jalan depan’ — it’s that simple.


How do you see the future of the film industry here?

Hans: I think it’s going to be stagnant. This is it. There might be one film that comes along, it will be successful, and that’s it. It’s unfortunate.

Deepak: American films are the highest grossing in the world. Next is India. Now it is Nollywood — the Nigerian film industry. They came up because there wasn’t a structure they had to work with, so they just happened. Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore — they all have very structured film industries. Look at how they have penetrated our market! But we can’t penetrate their market because of the limitations we’ve set ourselves creatively.

Hans: Put it this way, Malaysian cinema is predominantly Malay cinema. Malays watch Malay films. Chinese don’t watch them, Indians don’t watch them either. Chinese films? Chinese watch them, Indians watch them, and Malays watch them.

Deepak: We’re limited by the language, but it’s not just the language. It’s the stereotypical stories that people are bored with.

Hans: [The late] Yasmin [Ahmad] made beautiful stories. But did they sell? Remember Sepet? You put a hero dying at the end, people watch it once and that’s it. But if the hero lives, it’s a great thing. But who says that is what actually happens? We need to start telling real stories and we need to start accepting them too.

This article appeared in Options, the lifestyle pullout of The Edge Malaysia, Issue 807, May 24-30, 2010



Thursday, January 3, 2008

Article Archive: The Star (Thursday, January 3rd 2008)

The Star
Sharing Stories Through His Films 
Thursday, January 3rd 2008 

Deepak Kumaran Menon’s films may not be as well known as Bollywood blockbusters but they have won awards at film festivals at home and abroad. However, the young filmmaker wants to do more than just entertain.

MENTION Indian movies and images of Shah Rukh Khan immediately come to mind. But if Deepak Kumaran Menon has his way, these movies will show and do much more.

The 28-year-old, who already has two feature films to his credit, feels that movies can help break stereotypes.

“The people in my community have a lot of depth and I feel this needs to be put up on screen. After all, as long as you don’t share you can’t blame others for stereotyping us,” explains the award-winning indie film-maker.

“There just isn’t enough local Indian content in movies, so how are people supposed to know us?”

Deepak himself is no stranger to stereotypes: he tells of acting in supporting roles in local movies where, because he is an Indian, he is often cast as a robber or comic relief. Most of the Indian content we are exposed to comes from India; great colourful extravaganzas churned out by Bollywood.

“The Indians here are not just about singing and dancing. We are working very hard. The people at the stalls downstairs (his office is in Brickfields) work long hours ? so no singing and dancing, but maybe still have trees. Rubber trees.”

Deepak, of course, is referring to his first movie Chemman Chaalai (The Gravel Road) that came out in 2005. It’s about a girl who grows up in a rubber estate. She dreams of a better life by way of education.

In fact, the story was inspired by his mother who grew up in an estate.

“There was no film at the time about the issues of rubber tappers although everyone in Malaysia knows they exist.

 “We don’t really have that many rubber estates now, just oil palm. What happens when a generation asks what their great-grandfather did as a tapper? These films will help preserve the stories.”

Deepak’s second and latest film Chalanggai (Dancing Bells) is set in Brickfields which has a sizeable Indian population. “Who knows how long Brickfields will be like this? In Chalanggai, we tried to capture the soul of Brickfields.”

Although it may seem like a career in film is a logical choice – the family runs a video production company established the year Deepak was born – making Indian films with such humanistic content has not been easy.

Veterans in the business warned him about the pitfalls but the young film-maker felt that these “common Indian stories portraying the daily life of people as humanly and realistically as possible” simply had to be told.

Not surprisingly, the Indian community agrees as well. At an open audition for his first film, some 30 people turned up. They simply wanted to be part of a movie that reflected their lives.

Deepak said that in the end, it was the support of his fellow Malaysians that saw both films to their completion. He told of how pirates for Tamil films issued a hands-off on Chemman Chaalai and gave him a buffer by holding back other releases while it was running.

“The community supports us because they want change.” Both films have seen critical acclaim in the international film festival circuit; Chemman Chaalai received the Special Jury Award at the Nantes Festival 3 Continents 2005 in France and Chalanggai was selected as Best Film at the Osian Cinefan International Film Festival in New Delhi last July.

Although his films are classified as “foreign” by the authorities because they are not in Bahasa Malaysia, Deepak is not discouraged. “Outside of Malaysia, I’m flying the flag so the authorities don’t know whether to support me or not,” he explained with a laugh.

Recently, Chalanggai was adjudged Best Digital Film at the Festival Filem Malaysia. But digital film isn’t a recognised medium nor was Chalanggai classified as a local film.

“We’re in a grey area between being recognised and not existing. But things are changing and will continue to change,” he said optimistically.

“If you’re serious about what you’re doing, keep your direction. It’s not impossible to make it in this country,” Deepak explained.

Both his films came back from the Censorship Board with “100% pass, no cuts”.

Such change, he feels, is not about being rebellious and divisive as some have labelled indie film-makers.

“We promote in all four languages although many Chinese and Malays won’t watch my films. I feel that if you want to be majmuk, you must understand your own community first.

“A lot of people assume we’re radical, but we never had any radical intentions although our films are a departure from the norm. We are just sharing stories about our community.”

The recent bout of public demonstrations has made him cautious about what his next project should be. “If I was an opportunist, I would make a film about those rallies and become famous – and people will say Deepak Menon is a revolutionary.

“But I am a film-maker who loves his country. I cannot survive without Malaysia. I make it Malaysian although it is Indian content. The reason I do what I do is because I need to share stories about my community.

“I got to travel the world and meet people because I believed that I could do what I did within my own country. Stories about where I come from, just along the street or downstairs.”


Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Article Archive: Malaysian Cinema at 50

Malaysian Cinema at 50
Source: Benjamin McKay, The Sun, Wednesday, August 8, 2007 

The emergence of newly independent nation states in the heady aftermath of World War II coincided with a resurgence in global cinema. The most iconic art form and entertainment of the 20th century now found itself serving the spirit of modernism, and in newly emerging nations such as Malaysia, articulating visions of community and identity in the often contested service of nation-building. Cinema and nation became inextricably linked.

The emerging academic discipline of Film Studies began to talk about National Cinemas - collective cinematic achievements that both reflected a nation and helped to shape and sustain a nation - its history, belief systems, values and idiosyncratic anomalies. 

What do these national cinemas, as opposed to the globally triumphant Hollywood films, say about a given nation, a people or peoples and their imagined sense of collectivity and identity? Such a question still provides some controversy in academic circles, and as I will explore in this brief essay on Malaysian cinema, tends to raise more questions than it ever succinctly and conclusively manages to answer. 

Films were a potent and enthusiastically consumed part of the Malaysian scene from very early on in the medium's history. In 1901, at City Hall in Singapore, audiences vicariously attended the funeral of that most colonial of monarchs, Queen Victoria, when a screening of that event was first shown, and the emerging art and entertainment that was cinema became an integral part of the Malay(si)an cultural landscape in the years that ensued. 

Local Malay language films began production in the studios of Singapore during the 1930s and the industry itself took off with fervour and productivity again in the years following the Japanese occupation.

The years between 1946 and 1972 are referred to as Era Emas (the golden years) where in excess of 300 feature films in the Malay language were released, creating in the process a fully fledged industry and a recognisably unique local cinematic culture. 

An early film - Seruan Merdeka- (1946) directed by B S Rajhans - captured the sense of post- war idealism and a rare vision of multiculturalism. 

In the years that followed leading up to the proclamation of independence, a variety of contested and sometimes critical visions of post-colonial Malaysia were explored on screen - a film like Semerah Padi (1956, P. Ramlee) provided a particular template of possible post-colonial governance that was firmly informed by notions of traditional Malay culture and systems of order. 

The films at this time were produced and released by the Chinese movie moguls of Shaw Brothers and Cathay Keris, with their uniquely localised version of the studio system, centred as it was in Singapore

Many Indian directors helmed these features, but it was a mostly Malay world that was shown on screen. In time, Malay directors emerged who further explored, through localised genres, questions of identity, whether ethnic or national. 

The iconic P. Ramlee tackled social issues such as class and competing value systems in his own onscreen version of an emerging nation. Tradition and modernity; a rising middle class; the city versus the Kampung (village) - all of these developments were assessed on screen at this time. The uniquely localised genre of the Kampung film characterised by liberal smatterings of comedy, melodrama and music, explored the clash of urbanity with traditional values and modes of living. 

There was a cosmopolitan air about a lot of the cinema of this time, especially as the 1960s dawned. As academic Joel S Kahn has explored recently, no less a figure than P. Ramlee himself helped to shape the newly-emerging Malay identity. 

This legacy is a legacy of possibilities rather than certainties and other great filmmakers such as Hussein Haniff, M Amin, Jamil Sulong and Salleh Ghani emerged, among others, to extend the possibilities of Malaysian cinema. 

The split with Singapore in 1965 saw a schism in the industry that only highlighted the growing inadequacies of the studio-based culture, eventually helping to see its demise by 1972. 

During the 1970s, a sporadic film culture emerged in Malaysia that in some ways reflected the cautious and contested creative terrain that had developed largely as a response to the political, economic and social fallout following the events in the country after May 13, 1969. 

The cinema of the 70s, 80s and 90s were largely one of exclusion rather than of possibilities. Some important filmmakers did, however, stand out above the crowd including such talents as Shuhaimi Baba and U-Wei Haaji Sari who helped to launch Malaysian cinema into a more golbal viewership base.

But the cinema of this period did not largely extend the possibilities of that which had preceded it and rather than a truly national cinema, it can be likened more to a proto-national film culture - ethnically-based rather than a reflection of a mature and complex nation. 

Matters began to take on an exciting sense of change in the new millennium with the rise of independent filmmakers such as Amir Muhammad, James Lee, Yasmin Ahmad, Ho Yuhang, Bernard Chauly, Deepak Kumaran Menon and Tan Chui Mui who again have begun to explore a cinema of possibilities and opportunities. They do not always speak to the nation per se but their narratives are infused with a diverse and complex sense of both characterisation and representation. 

The cinematic legacy of the golden years was (and is) not without its detractors, and a similar sense of film being a site of debate and controversy exists today in the current assessment of the new wave of independent filmmakers. 

National cinema should be a site for reflection and alternative versions of self and communal identity. The cinema of Malaysia will be a truly national cinema when it can, with confidence, represent the diversity and complexity of the nation as a whole - its diversity of peoples, of remembered histories, of differing values and complex identities. 

If the new wave of independent filmmakers begin to cross over into the so-called mainstream terrain and infuse that cinema with their sense of inclusion and variety, then I believe we will witness the emergence of a truly mature national cinema in Malaysia.

Images of the Tunku proclaiming independence with a roar of "Merdeka!" launched the new nation - one borne as it were on cinema screens. 

The cinematic legacy of Malaysia over the past 50 years has reflected and indeed shaped the historical reality of that time. 

It now remains to be seen, as the nation enters its next 50 years of progress and development, whether the cinema of the nation will embrace the nation's complexities and rich diversity - its past, its present and its future. Only then will we be able to say that a mature national cinema has truly developed on Malaysia's cinema screens, fulfilling perhaps the promise of the golden years of its cinematic history.



Source:Benjamin McKay, The Sun, Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Article Archive : World Socialist Website (Tuesday 10 May 2005)

What should be encouraged

By David Walsh
Tuesday, 10 May 2005
This is the first in a series of articles about the recent San Francisco film festival, 
held April 21-May 5

 
The Gravel Road (Chemman Chaalai), from young Malaysian director Deepak Kumaran Menon, is one of the loveliest and most moving films I’ve seen in years. One has had grounds for asking recently: is this still possible, a work that never strikes a wrong emotional or dramatic note, that uses the camera to evoke quite precise and definite moods, whose performances (by non-professionals) are understated and nearly flawless, that contains a subtle but persistent and deeply-felt protest against social and national oppression? Such a film exists. And one has to feel heartened by its appearance.


This is not the end-all and be-all of world cinema. It is a relatively small piece, rooted in memory, a recreation of a specific place and time (a Malaysian rubber plantation in the 1960s). Perhaps the director would stumble if he took on more ambitious and contemporary problems. Who knows? We will see. In the meantime we have the pleasure of The Gravel Road. Let’s not be greedier than necessary in these difficult times.

According to Menon (born in Kuala Lumpur in 1979) in an interview, Indians make up eight percent of the Malaysian population, three-quarters of them Tamil-speaking. “The British brought the Indians to Malaysia in the 1940s, to the rubber plantations,” he explained. “And the Chinese were brought in for the tin mines. Of course they left the tin mines a long time ago. They control the economic power in the country, the Malays control the political power in the country. The Indians somehow could not fit into the society ...”

He went on, “As a matter of fact, Indians in Malaysia have the highest negative statistics. We have the highest crime rate, the highest school drop-out rate, etc. If you type in Google for Indian statistics you will see them.”

 

The film then, whose publicity amusingly describes it as “An Indian film without singing and dancing,” is in part an effort to give dignity to and put a face on the Indian plantation workers’ contribution and suffering. In the process, something more universal emerges.

A family is at the center of it. The Gravel Road is based on the experiences of the filmmaker’s mother. In fact, she wrote the script! The director made some significant changes in her story, to make the outcome more “hopeful.” But he will explain that himself later on.

Shantha lives on a rubber plantation with her parents, three other sisters and a younger brother. A uncle, Devan, a truck-driver, plays a role, as does one of his happy-go-lucky friends. Shantha has a quiet neighborhood suitor, Narean, as well as a dedicated teacher. The latter writes on the blackboard, “He who is determined will reach his goals.” Shantha takes this seriously; she wants to attend university, something nearly unheard of for a girl from her background.

The family’s financial position worsens. Both parents will have to take on additional work. Shantha studies long hours. Narean gently pursues her. He asks, “If you become a big person, will you forget me?” She, incredulous: “Me without you?” She also helps the family out by taking a job with a Chinese woman tailor, Atchi. When Shantha explains that she only knows a little, the woman replies, “Then your pay is little.”

Money for the eldest sister’s dowry (in an arranged marriage) must be raised. The mother proposes that her own jewelry be sold. The father has an accident on his bicycle; somehow the jewelry, the parents’ only valuable possession, is lost or stolen. A single shot: he lies on the bed in their small room, she sits on it. No words are necessary to convey the pain of the situation.


Pressures are placed on the father about Shantha’s schooling. People ask: hasn’t she been educated enough? The father defends her, “Let her do what she likes.” Someone tells him: “Don’t be offended. You have only one son. He’ll be there in your old age.” The teacher brings an application form for university. The crisis comes to a head. Her mother now tells Shantha she’s studied enough. The girl responds: “Do you want me to forget my dreams? Why’d you have so many children [i.e., so many mouths to feed]?” Devastated, the older woman poisons herself, although she eventually recovers. The girl is told she only thinks of herself; she rejects that, “I will help estate children become scholars like me.” She’s the only student from the plantation able to attend university.

Tragedy strikes people near her, in a traffic accident, and her uncle bears some responsibility. She curls up on her bed and refuses to eat. Now her mother comes to her and says: continue your studies. She replies, “I feel very sad, I can’t do it.” The older sister offers Shantha her wedding money, explaining: “I’m not interested in the marriage. I’m interested in someone else.”

Ultimately Shantha decides to take the university’s offer of a full scholarship. Her youngest sister is devastated. “You broke your promise to take me with you.” “I’ll return and take you all after my studies.” “Definitely?” “Definitely.” In the final sequence, shot from a distance, she’s leaving for school; the family stands outside their small house. The little girl runs to her. An embrace. She goes.

The Gravel Road contains a number of exquisite moments. The youngest daughter recounts the story of the ‘ugly duckling’ (or at least half of it) to her father in English while riding in front of him on a bicycle. The uncle silently and anonymously places a pair of new running shoes by one of his sleeping nieces, after she has bloodied her feet running races barefoot. After the fatal accident, the same man sits disconsolately in the family’s kitchen. Shantha never says a word, but pours him a glass of water, in an act of forgiveness and reconciliation.

One of the most memorable characters turns out to be Atchi, the Chinese tailor. One expects something of a stereotype, that she will be a slave-driver. Instead we feel that her life has been very difficult, dominated by hard work. She sings while she sews, about beautiful, far-off things. When Shantha quits the job, Atchi goes inside her shop and brings the girl a dress, and hands her a bonus. “Study well,” is all she says, and we know what she means—so your life will be different than mine. One’s chest tightens. How does someone know all this at twenty-five or so, when our 40 and 50-year-old American filmmakers have managed to learn virtually nothing of any use to anyone? 

In fact, most film artists in the world today are falling down on the job: to lay bare social and psychological reality, to enrich humanity’s understanding of itself, to make sense of life. A devotion to career and wealth is not the only trap set for the contemporary filmmaker; self-involvement, the pursuit of the trivial or outright ignorance have laid low far too many.

Menon’s instincts are healthy ones. He pursues life and represents it conscientiously, movingly, sensuously. Again, more can be done in cinema, more can be attempted, but what has been done here is not insignificant. The life of a working class family, a social circumstance, a moment in history, presented in detail, with care, with sympathy, with sharp eyes, with genuine artistry. Not a small thing. No, not these days. This is also an answer to the semi-hysterical films about the oppressed from Scandinavia and Britain, for example, which prevent the filmgoer from seeing or feeling anything except the director’s own disorientation and morbidity.

Every work is a polemic, and this one argues for a serious approach to lives that are not generally treated seriously today. More than that, the representation of Shantha’s fierce determination to leave the rubber plantation is a protest against a narrow and oppressive condition that provokes such determination. Whether she goes to university or not is secondary, what matters is the life shown, its tragedy, its complexity. The director has succeeded in getting to that.

In our interview, Menon explained the changes he made to his mother’s life story. “She is from a rubber estate. I had to change a certain part of her life. In real life, she was not able to go to university. She settled down on the estate. But her achievement, in her own mind, was that she made sure that all her children made it to the university. And my sisters and myself all graduated from college. I condensed the generations. I couldn’t make it into a TV series!,” he said, laughing mischievously.

He continued: “But also I wanted the film to be more hopeful and so I changed the ending. This is what I had in mind actually: I wanted to present a different part of Indian life, both to the Malaysian community itself and also to everyone else who watched this film.”

We discussed the question of Shantha’s apparent selfishness in pursuing her university education. The director commented, “I had to go into these issues because the estate community is a very close community. It’s not necessarily considered a good thing to leave the estate. I did a lot of interviews with the estate people. Some of them are very happy with their lives. And there are others who want to leave, who want an opportunity to get out. So I had to balance these things.”

I said, “It’s a delicate question. Does someone from the working class simply go off to university and forget about everyone else? The girl says, ‘Well, I’m going to come back and teach the children here.’”

Menon remarked, “My mom is a Tamil school teacher, she’s been a teacher all her life. That is what she wanted. She helps other people. She does a lot of things to get her students into university. I’ve met a lot of her ex-students, she has a lot of passion for education.”
I noted, “It’s clear that the girl is not simply selfish.”

The director: “At a certain point she seems a little self-centered, but I think to help others first you have to help yourself. I teach in the university, in multi-media, in Kuala Lumpur. Because of the quota system it makes it hard for Indians to get into university. It’s a big challenge. I was the first Indian staff to be in my faculty, it’s very hard to get even one Indian guy in my class. What do the Indians do after the age of 12? They reach 12 years old, and they already find it difficult to continue to secondary level of education. And most of them don’t make it, unless they leave the country, unless they are rich enough.

“There’s a huge gap between the rich and the poor, in the Indian community itself. The divide is very obvious. You can see the really rich—the really, really rich—textile traders and others, they might own a lot of Kuala Lumpur itself, then you have the really poor, still in the rubber estates, and still on the outskirts of KL. It’s very difficult to achieve anything at all.”

I mentioned Atchi: “It’s not a nationalist film. I thought the Chinese woman was beautifully done. She’s one of the most remarkable characters. Her farewell to the girl ...”
He replied, “The Chinese in Malaysia always fought for education. They said, you can disturb anything, but do not disturb our schools. The Chinese are very passionate about education, and they always are supportive of anyone who wanted to go in that direction. The scene where she’s singing? I tried not to have singing and dancing, but I couldn’t help it.”

I referred to ethnic and other kinds of stereotypes.

“Stereotypes ... well, I sent the film to the distributor,” Menon explained, “and the first five minutes, which are quite dark, they thought there would be a rape scene and so on. I was playing around. There are a lot of stereotypes about Malaysian Indians, that they’re all criminals, etc. Malay films in Malaysia portray Indians this way. I’ve played small roles in Malay films, as an actor. They give me roles as robbers, thieves who break into houses. I say, ‘Man, why do you always give me these roles?! I can be a good friend or something.’

“The Malay films often portray the Indian characters like this with Malay actors who have dark skin. Already it’s a stereotype, they have to be dark, they have to be moronic. We already had these stereotypes, it’s very easy to go in that direction. But it causes harm somewhere along the line. So when I did the film I tried to portray as much as I could the other side of the Indian community.”

He continued: “The film appeals a lot to the estate people. These [the performers] are all non-professionals. I pulled them off the street. If you pluck any guy from the street they would have a clear idea of the estate, either because of their own experiences, or their parents’. The actors are from KL, but they have the experience. Some of the rubber estates have become palm oil estates—rubber is not doing too well—and also, golf courses. For them it’s a big memory, it’s a big part of our lives. In fact, I lived on a rubber estate with my grandma, every holiday I used to hang out there. A lot of things bring back memories.”

The young filmmaker commented on his limited resources. “I storyboarded the entire film. I could not afford to waste anything. I had to shoot a lot of scenes, and I had to do it really fast. If you watch the film, you see some scenes have a lot of actors in them, and I only had two wireless mikes and one boom. I had to catch the environment. All the sound is natural sound. I couldn’t afford to do voiceovers. I needed to get the shot fast and right. I had to plan everything, lights, mikes.

“A lot of things happened because of practicalities. In the scene with the mother and father, the room was extremely small, I couldn’t fit a lot of angles in it. It’s not always for profound reasons. I love the scene with the ‘ugly duckling.’ The girl came in telling me the story; I thought it was a beautiful story. I have a little meaning behind this. I was implying that if the Indians continued to cause trouble in Malaysia, we are going to be kicked out. You are the ‘ugly duckling.’ Some people got it, they said, ‘Oh my god, what are you doing?’”

He made a final point about ethnicity, which seemed to sum up his attitude. “There’s a scene with a ghost? It’s a Nyonya ghost. That’s a people who are in danger of extinction. A mix of Chinese, Malay and some of the British. They speak their own language. They have no rights, because they don’t fall into the main categories. They fall in the ‘Others’ category. In an Indian film, you see an Indian ghost, in a Chinese film, you see a Chinese ghost, so I thought, why not an ‘Other race’ ghost? She was my production designer, a Nyonya.”

Other films, other questions
Another film from Malaysia, Sepet, by a Malay director, Yasmin Ahmad, is not as successful, but it has its moments. About an interracial relationship, between a Malay girl and a Chinese boy, the work is a little heavy-handed in its opposition to communalism and racism. We are not likely to miss the theme. In the first scene, the Chinese kid, ‘Jason,’ reads a passage from the Bengali poet and novelist Rabindranath Tagore to his mother. They discuss it: “It’s a different culture, a different language, yet we can feel what was in his head.”

The film is saved from its own good intentions largely by the performance of Sharifah Amani as Orked, the Malay teenager who loves everything Chinese. She’s a delight in various languages and combinations thereof. “The French fries here are the best!” she proclaims in English at one point. A scene in a hospital between Jason and his friend (who is also in love with Orked) is also memorable. They agree that hundreds of years ago interracial marriage was possible. “How come it’s hard now?” The relationship between Orked and Jason runs into difficulties. In a memorable scene, Orked and her mother weep in a car over the sad fate of love, threatened as it is by ethnic divisions and other social pressures. They weep convincingly.

The Riverside, directed by Alireza Amini—who made Letters in the Wind, about conscripts in the Iranian armed forces in 2002, a film that had censorship problems—is an unsettling work set on the Iraq-Iranian border. A group of Iraqi Kurds is heading toward the border to escape the disaster created by the US invasion. A young bride with a red veil and red suitcase, on her wedding day, is among them. She has stepped on a land-mine. If she lifts her foot, the mine will detonate. Her husband has run to a nearby village for help.

Various people come upon her in her plight: a man carrying the corpse of his young son in a plastic bag; a woman whose only possession, a cow, has run off, frightened by war-planes; a young man loaded down with weapons for sale; a grumpy older man and his thirsty sons. Each sets aside his or her difficulties for a moment in the face of the young bride’s horrifying situation. The old man says, “We’ve become homeless because of war and politics, but since I’ve seen this bride I’ve forgotten my problems.” They talk to her, sing to her, tell her stories. The young man with weapons tells her to place rocks on her foot to keep weight on the mine.

The enormous suffering of the people of the region is brought home. The girl, who, despite her predicament, lowers her veil when the first of the passersby speaks to her, wails and shrieks. Here is oppressed humanity waiting entirely passively, one feels, to be helped, or destroyed. The radio broadcasts news of the US invasion.

Despite its grim premise, the film manages to be both compassionate and even humorous. The cross-talk among the stragglers is entirely convincing. The old woman tells a strange, lengthy story about a woman who keeps divorcing her husbands after she’s not pleased by the wedding feasts. At each meal she’s offered only dried bread and a fish-head, and she demands a divorce! Five, six times! Finally, she gives up, ‘What can I do? I’ve changed husbands, I can’t change fate. I have to live with it.’

What’s the director’s attitude toward this kind of resignation? Presumably he’s critical of the passivity shown by the refugees. “We have to do something,” everyone agrees ... but what? They place their hopes in the husband, whose running legs are the only parts we ever see.

In ironic counterpoint, another old woman carries two girls on her back through the harsh landscape, promising them a wonderful future: “Everywhere in the world is nice, mountains, desert. You’ll be brides, beautiful brides.” Needless to say, the film does not end happily.

Champions from the Czech Republic is not a flawless work, but it seems like an attempt to get at something about contemporary life in eastern Europe. A group of more or less impoverished Czechs, only one of whom seems to hold down a steady job, eke out an existence in a miserable small town. For the men, ice hockey is the center of their life; in fact, it is their entire life. One of their number turns out to be possessed of the ability, when drunk to the point of senselessness, of predicting the outcomes of hockey games. One thing leads to another.

Nationalism and racism feed off the economic and moral despair. “We have to root for ourselves, because no one else will!” says one of the locals. When the Czechs win the world title, chants of “We’re the champions!” ring out from the wretched barroom. The irony will be lost on no one.
Hungary has specialized in gloomy, misanthropic films in the post-Stalinist era (and perhaps before). Dealer, about 24 hours in the life of a nameless drug dealer, is not entirely free of self-conscious moroseness, but it shows a bit of life too along the way. And not a pretty life. The dealer, who mostly sits and listens, is both a dispenser of pain and a source of relief to those in desperate need: a religious leader with an absurdly distended abdomen, a college student whose friend has been groaning for days, an ex-girl-friend whose daughter may or may not be the dealer’s own, his own father crazed with grief and loneliness after the suicide of his wife. One derives a picture of people at sea, without any hope of reaching land.

There are different tendencies in world film-making. The Gravel Road represents one. French director Claire Denis’ The Intruder, another. The latter work concerns an older man who needs a heart transplant and uses his considerable resources to purchase one. He seems cold, brutal. The director says, “He is a loveless guy and a heartless guy. A man without compassion, he is greedy, he wants more life, more everything.” We see him in bed with a woman, murdering a man, conducting business in South Korea, finally pursuing and attempting to reconcile with his son in the South Seas.

The film, like nearly every other work by Denis, does nothing for me. One senses that the director is simply taking shots in the dark, guessing at what might be important. We are told by one critic that the “theme of border crossing, cultural displacement, and societal acceptance or rejection has been consistent in the films of Claire Denis.” Perhaps. But what does she say about this theme? One shouldn’t ask such impertinent questions.

The director expresses her feelings. I don’t know what to make of them. She tells us little about the world, merely something about her feelings. Her feelings intervene between the viewer and the world. I know something about how Denis views her filmmaking and her position in filmmaking. (“By writing the script, I can see the locations and feel what the locations express. I can see the lens that I am going to use. Everything is familiar to me. The film is not taking me by surprise; I am inside the film.” Of what use are these observations to anyone?) We know she aspires to be taken seriously. She aspires to be a serious artist. But we know next to nothing more about the world, which is far more interesting and varied in the end.

As opposed to this, what we see in a film like The Gravel Road, is a ‘surrendering’ by the artist to the world, in the words of Aleksandr Voronsky, Soviet critic and Left Oppositionist. Voronsky wrote, “But it will not be subjective if the artist surrenders himself to the world, if, to use philosophical language, he reproduces the thing-in-itself rather than the thing-for-us. By surrendering to the flood of his initial supra-rational perceptions, by re-embodying himself, the artist virtually dissolves his ‘ego’ into these perceptions, not, however, in order to run away from his own being, but to find the world as it is in itself, in its most lively and beautiful forms.”

One sees affected, self-conscious films, films made to impress, like Duck Season from Mexico, about a pair of teenage boys left on their own in one of the families’ apartment, like The Intruder. And one sees The Gravel Road, The Riverside, with their limitations. Here are two opposed tendencies. I will take the latter any day, twenty times a day.

Source:
World Socialist Website

Tuesday, April 5, 2005

Article Archive: A lens on the Malaysian margins


International Herald Tribune | The New York Times

A lens on the Malaysian margins
By Lim Li Min
Published: Tuesday, April 5, 2005

KUALA LUMPUR — Ethnic Indians have been living in Malaysia since the 19th century, but little about their estranged community has been committed to celluloid. "Chemman Chaalai," made by the Indian-Malaysian director Deepak Kumaran Menon, is only one of two films in the country to have done so. The measured, low-key film, made almost entirely in Tamil, deals with an especially marginalized section of the Indian population: rubber estate workers.

"We were brought into the estates, and we are still in the estates," said Menon, 26, whose spartan production house is located in a working-class Indian neighborhood in Kuala Lumpur. The film is his first full-length feature. Intense, he talks and gesticulates quickly, shoulder-length hair framing his face.

Indians are the smallest of the three main ethnic groups in Malaysia and control only about 1.5 percent of the country's wealth. Malaysia's ethnic Malays have traditionally been the country's administrators while the Chinese have generally been in command of the economy.

Indians began arriving as laborers in then-Malaya in the 19th century as workers on British rubber and oil palm estates, once the mainstay of the country's economy. But thousands of ethnic Indians have lost their jobs in recent decades as manufacturing and service industries have supplanted agriculture.

Made for a budget of $40,000, or about 152,000 ringgits, in 15 days, "Chemman Chaalai" was shot in digital video and was funded entirely by Menon's father, Shanker Menon, who is the film's executive producer, and Tan Chui Mui, the producer. The film has been screened at the International Film Festival in Rotterdam and has been invited to the San Francisco International Film Festival. It had a nearly two-month run in commercial cinemas in Malaysia.

Set in the late 1960s, "Chemman Chaalai" is about Shantha, an impoverished girl from a rubber estate who is determined to attend university. But she faces major obstacles. She may have to start working because her family needs money for her eldest sister's dowry. And at a time when girls were not traditionally encouraged to study, her ambitions in her small estate community are unprecedented.

Menon never thrusts any one character under the spotlight for long, framing them instead in long takes, letting the human drama unspool gradually.

Despite being born and raised in urban Kuala Lumpur, Menon is no stranger to estate life. His grandfather was an estate supervisor from Kerala, India; his mother spent all her life on a plantation until she met Menon's father. Menon's childhood also provided plenty of material; he spent many school holidays with his grandmother in a southern Malaysian estate. She spoke only Malayalam, a Kerala dialect, to him; he whiled away long days by throwing stones at passing trains, he says. In the film, a train, a mere blur, passes by the estate, which Shantha looks at longingly. Life on an estate might be hermetic, but there's always a sense in the film of a greater world - and opportunities - out there.

"'Chemman Chaalai' is the story of my mother's life," said Menon, who lectures in animation at a local university. A primary-school teacher and occasional writer for a local Tamil daily, Sooria Kumari, his mother, penned the script after watching Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy films together with her youngest son. "There were 13 children in my mother's family. She always placed a lot of emphasis on education, but she had to forgo university education for the sake of her siblings," he said.

The film struck a deep chord with the ethnic Indian community. When placing advertisements for actors in local Tamil dailies, Menon received more than 30 calls a day for two weeks. "I was so surprised," he said. "They came by bus, they took the train, but they all wanted to tell their stories."

The stereotyping of the Indian community in Malaysian movies has long irked Menon. His cast was "fed up with the over-exaggerated portrayals of Indians on TV; it wasn't how they were. They wanted the freedom to be themselves," he said.

In Malaysia, the majority Malays have legal privileges that the Indians and Chinese do not. Smaller in number and less vocal than the Chinese, Indians have been marginalized both economically and politically, a problem that is only beginning to be discussed in the country's mainstream press.

But rather than painting a bleak picture, Menon's film is upbeat. In the film, Shantha's parents are happily married, her family close-knit and largely supportive of her ambitions. "Chemman Chaalai," meaning the gravel road, "is the way out to the larger world."

Menon co-founded Onehundredeye, a production company, with his father. Shanker Menon, 62, used to work tarring roads, then became a mechanic. But his interest in photography blossomed into a passion for film.He set up an editing suite, taking students under his wing at home. He also tutored his children in film editing. "I've been carrying cables around since I was 9," the younger Menon said.

That hands-on experience proved useful in the making of "Chemman Chaalai." Menon worked with a minimalist on-set crew of five. He faced the challenge of lighting the film with costly studio equipment at night. He asked actors to find '60s-style clothing from their families. But he had an even greater obstacle in promoting the film to potential investors."I had to completely storyboard it before anyone would give me an appointment," he said.

While the government has supported mainstream directors, almost all of that financial help has gone to ethnic Malay producers.

Malaysia's film output, at around 20 films a year, makes it a difficult market to crack. Most films, some headlined by local pop stars, are of dubious quality. Despite this, a new wave of young, independent directors and digital cameras have opened cheaper avenues of filmmaking. Largely ignored at home, their works have found recognition abroad. Yasmin Ahmad's "Sepet" and James Lee's "The Beautiful Washing Machine" have won awards at international film festivals recently.

Menon is conscious of the debt to his family and community. "I made this film for my parents," he said. "I wanted to make a film they could watch." He says his next film, also in Tamil, won't be quite-as sunny.


End.