A frame at a time: Kelantan’s pioneering film festival

Thirty years on since the closure of its cinemas, Kelantan recently featured its first small-scale film festival.

Hosted at the Hokkien Huay Kuan Kelantan (Hokkien Association of Kelantan) building in the heart of the city, Pesta Filem Kota Bharu 2023 was born out of a collaboration between Amir Muhammad (Kuman Pictures), publisher Zaidi Musa, journalist/video producer Ang Wu Chong, and a collective of independent Kelantanese filmmakers.

The festival opened with a series of documentaries featuring rich stories that had Kelantan's complex mosaic of culture on full display.

The selection of films presents an ongoing conversation with the past and engagement with the present.

For example, ‘Hilang’ (missing) is a timely short about Kelantan’s bygone cinemas that puts forward the question of what is "lost" or "being lost".

It is told through a couple of interviews and several hauntingly beautiful interior shots of a former cinema building - which is now abandoned.

Quite a few of the projects were carried out under the direction of Ang Wui Chong, drawing from years of experience as a reporter for Sin Chew Daily.

Amongst them was a film celebrating lifelong photographer, Ooi Ah Lek (90), best known for his documentation of the 1977 Emergency (emergency due to a political crisis) in Kelantan.

Subsequently, ‘Warisan Bayangan’ detailed the life of Eyo Hock Seng, Kelantan’s sole Chinese tok dalang (master puppeteer) still practising and teaching wayang kulit in the state.

Featured on closing day was ‘A Queen’s Tale’, an ambitious “seram” (horror) film surrounding Kelantanese Chinese taboos and a mysterious connection with royal lineages of old.

Still a work in progress, this ambitious foray into feature-length fiction with in-house visual effects hints at bigger things to come out of Kota Bharu's small but promising scene.

Day two began with a series of short scares from the Kuman Pictures Challenge (KPC4) finalists. The 10 supernatural-themed finalists fashioned interesting uses for the challengers’ mandatory prop, which was a football.

Prizes were handed out following the conclusion of the screenings with ‘Sathamindri’, directed by Sidhaarthan, taking home the grand prize of RM1,500.

Closing the festival was Jacky Yeap’s ‘Sometime’, a slow-burn, anti-cinematic gem of a film centred on the relationship between a single mother and her son.

Lingering shots and respect for mundane everyday situations amplified the sense of familiarity that came across in the film.

Ultimately, the film festival shed light on the diversity and flexibility of filmmaking in our country and region.

Sometimes, we need not turn to dramatic camera movements, heavy colour grading, and an intense overture of strings to make us feel.

Sometimes, it just takes sitting through seemingly unremarkable events and finding meaning between the awkward pauses and silence of our existence.

As for the event, both days also featured panel discussions with a diverse array of voices and visionaries from the local film scene and beyond.

Sharing ideas

Amongst those in attendance were directors Badrul Hisham Ismail (‘Maryam Pagi Ke Malam’), Mogal Selvakannu (‘Don’t Rock The Boat’), Yeap, and film lecturer Norman Yusoff, who also curates Wayang Budiman, a bi-weekly film screening event in Shah Alam.

These discussions offered insight into the challenges of ground-up filmmaking in and around Malaysia. Most noteworthy was a conversation with Acehnese documentarian and film activist, Akbar Rafsanjani.

Akbar shed light on how Aceh’s growing film scene has successfully navigated a similar environment to that of Kelantan, with Aceh being a religiously conservative province in Sumatra.

There had been more screenings scheduled in the original programme but some changes had to be made for the film festival to proceed.

Nevertheless, what made Kelantan’s first film festival a success in my eyes was the people who came.

It was a privilege to spend a weekend with the bright, passionate and unrelentingly kind individuals who have undoubtedly set the reels in motion for Kelantan’s cinematic future.

It’s a long road ahead, and to expand on the often abused saying, to make an omelette, you must break a few eggs, but when someone at the table is egg-intolerant, you’ve got to find another way.

Either way, you’ve made an omelette. - Mkini

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Low Weiyan is a doctorate candidate in Cultural Anthropology at Leiden University, currently conducting research on Islamic future-making and technology in Malaysia.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.