Actualités

“Roh” (Soul) is Emir Ezwan‘s first feature film, following the short “RM10” (2016), while his credits also include supervising the SFX for Namron’s “Crossroads: One Two Jagga“.

On the occasion of “Roh” streaming on Mubi, we speak with him about his approach and his inspiration about the film, his visual approach and the location the film was shot, working with Namron, Malaysian cinema and the role of streaming services, and other topics.

Action and horror flicks are, probably, the two most popular genres in Malaysian cinema, with films like “Munafik” and its sequel being the first that come to mind. You, however, did something completely different with “Roh”. Was that one of your purposes regarding the film, to shoot a different horror movie?

“Roh” doesn’t follow the Malay horror flick archetype, because I wanted to adopt a playful approach for it. I wanted to utilize Malay folktales for...

Action and horror flicks are, probably, the two most popular genres in Malaysian cinema, with films like “Munafik” and its sequel being the first that come to mind. It is, thus, always joyful to discover directors that try to do something different within the latter genre, with Emir Ezwan’s feature debut definitely falling under this category.

“Soul” screened at Udine Far East Film Festival

The story takes place inside and around a traditional Malay house in the middle of the forest, where a family of three makes a living in the woods in an unspecified time period. The two kids, Along and Angah, spend most of their time placing traps in the forest and bringing home the animals caught, for their mother, Mak, to cook, but it is during this task that they first encounter a grotesque sign that something is going wrong. A bit later, a young girl...

Malaysia’s film development corporation will showcase 10 films at the festival.

National Film Development Corporation Malaysia (Finas) is showcasing 10 Malaysian films through a new initiative, Malaysia Goes to Cannes.

The 10 films will be presented by their producers and directors at an event in Palais I on Tuesday, May 17 (2pm-4pm). Around 15 minutes of footage will be screened from each film.

The line-up includes Tamil-language crime drama Jagat, selected for this year’s New York Asian Film Festival; Mohd Khairul Azri’s Pekak [pictured], about the relationship between a drug dealer and a troubled schoolgirl; and Syamsul Yusof’s Munafik, a Malay and Arabic-language horror, which is Malaysia’s highest-grossing local film so far this year with $4.2m (RM17.04m).

The Cannes programme is the first in a series of events planned by Finas, headed by director general Dato Kamil Othman, to increase distribution of Malaysian films overseas.

“The film industry in Malaysia is seeing a flourishing of talents...