2023 seems to be a pretty good year for Malaysian films with a string of releases that are, if not great, at least interesting. This one was fully crowdfunded and then released for free on YouTube, allowing it ignore government censorship concerns. It’s effectively a dystopian action thriller that pushes racial segregation to its most extreme. It’s clever in how its appropriates the word ‘Pendatang’ and it slyly critiques how racism is manufactured by elites for their personal gain. I was disappointed however in that it’s not that well made and its scenario is really more about life under a totalitarian police state than about racism. It’s a valiant effort but it doesn’t really say much about life in modern day Malaysia.

Following a referendum, the various ethnicities of Malaysia are segregated by law with each race being forced to live in their respective zones. Those caught in the wrong zone or who collaborates with other races are killed by militia forces. A Chinese family is assigned to a house in a previously Malay village. The father Wong had previously voted in favor of segregation and is prejudiced against Malays. The mother Shan is more ambivalent and they have two children, Yan and Bobby. While cleaning the house, the family discovers that a little Malay girl has been hiding in the attic. Wong wants to report her to the militia but Shan insists on protecting her and tries to give her food. Due to the t-shirt she is wearing, the family nicknames her Panda. One of the militia members named Botak turns out to be the elder sister of a friend of Yan’s who was killed by Malays. Botak reveals that the militia is really a kind of protection racket run by its leader and steals the asthma medicine that Bobby needs for them. One day Botak sees Yan and Bobby playing with Panda and nearly kills her but the children manage to talk her out of it.

The script by Ng Ken Kin is cleverly written and the dystopian premise feels science-fiction despite the lack of any high-tech elements. The legalese quoted to justify the actions of the militia helps sell the scenario. It still looks like a very low budget film as the security checkpoints controlling access between the zones of each race consist only of flimsy jury-rigged barriers. The goods that are traded between the zones are pieces of furniture that look old and used. Acting quality varies widely between acceptable and inexecrable. The film has no real pretensions about quality cinematography and the action scenes are often awkward but at least none of it looks downright terrible. Due to the lack of budget, the world that they created is tiny, leaving us starved for details of what the rest of this alternate version of Malaysia looks like. It might also have contributed to this being effectively an action thriller instead of the political thriller that would been a better use of the premise.

As for its theme, anyone who is at all familiar with Malaysia would recognize how the races are segregated and in no way the harmonious community shown in the propaganda. Malaysians will also be sympathetic to the film’s central claim that actually prejudice among the people aren’t that bad and that racial divisions are deliberately fanned by political leaders for selfish purposes. Yet this lets ordinary Malaysians off the hook too easily as the elites would not be able to exploit divisions that weren’t already there. The fact is that real differences in terms of lifestyle and values exist and it’s not obvious how to reconcile them. Similarly the enforced segregation shown in this film is a sci-fi fantasy when the issues in contention in real life Malaysia is institutional prejudice and how to regulate society in a way that satisfies everybody. As such horrible as it is, this is still a kind of feel good film that dodges the issues that really matter. By making the Chinese militia so cartoonishly evil, it arguably even changes the subject. Wong’s family would much rather flee to a Malay-controlled zone than stay where they are. In this way, it’s much more about the awfulness of living in a police state than the segregation.

I’ve long held that Malaysian cinema can never be truly great unless it tackles the issues at the very heart of Malaysian society and no issue matters more than the fact that the different ethnicities have different ideas of what it means to be a citizen. It’s commendable therefore to finally see a film brave enough to even raise the issue. Yet this is an incomplete and shallow treatment that deliberately strives to be an inoffensive as possible, being effectively a Chinese-led film intent on not pushing the buttons of Malays. It’s a sad indictment of the state of our society that even this much is deemed too much for the censors but Malaysian cinema still has a long way to go.