Village People Radio Show
Amir Muhammad
Banned in Malaysia, the film features interviews with some aged, surviving members of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) now living in an idyllic south Thailand village.
In the production notes for the film, writer-director Amir Muhammad declares that the “history of Malaysia, like any other nation, is not served by shutting out voices that do not conform to a hegemonic telling. Otherwise, we would end up with a history of amnesia.”
Which also happens to be the title of local writer Alfian Sa’at’s 2001 poetry collection – his salvo against the encroachment of forgetfulness and silence in Singapore.
While Amir’s sentiment is noble, his idiosyncratic film can be hard to follow as much of the context is not given and the interviewees are not clearly identified.
Still, kudos to him for getting around the problem of too much talking-heads footage by having the interviews unfold over scenes of tranquil village life, juxtaposing memories of the turbulent past with the sleepy present.
Meanwhile, the constant presence of children – the film opens with a little boy giving a short self-introduction in Thai – is at once hopeful and a reminder of the permanence of exile.
And the constant interruption of a fictional Thai radio drama about a wronged queen enforces the point that history cannot be neatly contained or easily told in a straightforward manner.
Perhaps it’s best to think of this as an (even more) experimental companion piece to his similarly banned The Last Communist, about CPM leader Chin Peng.
(ST)