‘SEMAN: A LOST HERO’, MADE MALAYSIAN FILM HISTORY FOR GETTING NOMINATION FOR BEST FILM IN A FESTIVAL IN EUROPE/WEST, IN 1990 – A RECORD THAT HAS NEVER BEEN BROKEN TILL TODAY!

By Mansor bin Puteh

I have been waiting for a long time now to see which other Malaysian or film by Malaysian that has broken this record that I had created, unknowingly, when I found out when I was attending the Figuera da Foz International Film Festival at the city that the festival is named after, in Portugal in April, 1990.

The film was made in 1985 and completed a year later. It was not shown in the cinemas but on Astro and few other international film festivals.

It has been thirty years (yes, 30) now since that happened; and I am not sure if this record or the history my small film which was supposed to be my masters thesis film for Columbia University in New York City, could be broken and how and how it would look like.

The organizers of the festival did not inform me that they had placed my film in the few films they had nominated for best film until I was there to participate in their festival.

It was also the first time I was in Portugal and to go there one has to switch planes at Heathrow where Malaysia Airlines (MAS) had offered me a return ticket to allow me to participate in the festival, with the festival offering the connecting flight to Lisbon, where I was welcome by their welcoming committee who drove me to the City of Figuera da Foz which is two hundred kilometers away.

‘Seman’ had nothing special so this is what’s so ‘special’ with this film I tried to produce and direct with a screenplay I had written when I was still at Columbia.

I never submitted it to the university because I wanted to submit another one after gaining a bit more experience working on my debut film. But later on I sent the VHS copy of the film to someone at Venice Film Festival but it was too late for them to select it; but he gave a glowing comment on it that no one in Malaysia could give, because he was looking at it from so far away.

Ordinary Malaysian film viewers could not see much in it; but those who have a bit more background in film can see more.

Not much of the film is related in dialogue and this is what my training in film at Columbia had taught me. I learnt a lot from my screenplay instructor, Frank Daniels who himself did not say or admit that he was teaching us the course in screenwriting.

All that I could remember till now was he said one need to know what to say and how to say it in film.

Unfortunately, for many Malaysian filmmakers, they do not know what they are saying and worse, they do not know how to say it. So their works are very confusing.

And it is this confusion that seems to attract the lesser viewers who did not care to find out the latent ideas and philosophy hidden in the story, plot, characters, intrigues, for they have none of this other than the distractions they could get from all the screaming and scolding and other forms or verbal and physical abuses they could get, all copied from films that had been shown before produced by Hollywood films.

So no wonder most Malaysian films are Fake Hollywood stuff that unfortunately could go on to break box office records which seems to be the sole yardstick of the producers who only wanted to count on cash earning for their productions despite the chagrin they had created in the minds of the more serious film analysts and the few cineastes that we have in the country.

Alas! The New Malaysian Cinema cannot and can never accept these films to form the basis for its creation; and this is despite the fact that the country produces scores of films per year, but most if not all are Fake Hollywood and not inspiring and does not represent the new thinking Malaysians hold.

It is unfortunate that Malaysia is missing in most of these films. They fail to record time in the stories their filmmakers wish to tell. They have no relevance – social, cultural, historical, psychological, philosophical and even religious, which I had tried to infuse into my debut work.

‘Seman: A Lost Hero’ is basically about a young advertising executive who feels he has succeed in his life so he is lost and does not know what else that he can do with himself. The only way to get away from his personal confusion is for him to look back, at himself and his family and the history of his country!

Many people do not realized that the formation of Finas under the Act of Parliament in 1981 has not proven to be a real and final solution to all the malaise that the industry faced; it is also ironic how there has not been any study or even debate on the Finas Act of 1981 or Akta 244 itself that was drafted by some people who did not seem to know what they wanted the Act to achieve.

Unfortunately, the most glaring part that is missing from this Act is the lacking in the position on the philosophy that the new Malaysian film industry ought to take. And in its absence the industry failed to take because its activists and filmmakers were not given any inkling of what they should aim for in the creation of their films.

So in the end there is confusion and despite Finas having been formed almost forty years, the new Malaysian film industry has failed to be created; worse, the New Malaysian Cinema, the industry ought to have caused to happen has not happened.

For the New Malaysian Cinema to happen, we need to create a new generation of film critics and scholars.

My small film ‘Seman: A Lost Hero’ was thus lost because not many in the industry knew how to look at it with the audience being confused by those who had the means to create their own works based on the films they had seen, without even one single shot that is not copied.

Malaysian films have become Fake Hollywood when they could be more original to serve the creation of the New Malaysian Film Industry and hence, the New Malaysian Cinema, all serving a better cause to promote more issues for discourses and appreciation by many Malaysians.

The Malaysia in 1980 was totally different than the Malaysia that we can see today. Unfortunately, the different phases in the development of the country; not only in economic terms but in other aspects are not recorded in any film. I had tried to show some in my film, but it is on the Malaysia that was fast-changing in the 1980s when the film was made and the story set.