In my years of approaching celebs for pro bono work, the most frustrating were from the Mandarin Pop scene. Many pulled out on shoot days due to cold feet. Those were days when non-MCA sanctioned projects were considered subversive, ie up till days ago.
This sort of gutlessness used to frustrate me and I lost friendships because of it. So I look on at the current “celeb positional reset” with no small amount of bemusement. Yet it is easy to forget that ppl were genuinely scared, not just spineless.
For instance, an NTV7 news editor was put on “cold storage” because he devised and approved a screening of “Undilah” that bypassed censorship. He eventually left and now works for @jsadiq at the Insight. He is one of the unsung heroes in our story.
There are many such heroes. We have received help from sympathisers within MSM and government departments without which our projects could not happen. These folks helped despite risk of losing their jobs. To me, they are the real heroes.
Corporations, too, were scared. Execs who worked for the sponsors of 15Malaysia came within an inch of yanking their logo from our films because they were fearful of having their license revoked. The company’s CEO intervened and the logos eventually stayed.
I looked on with bemusement two days later upon release, when it was clear we had a massive hit on our hands, the same execs tripped over themselves to take credit. Such is human nature. We are seeing the same hypocrisy now with embarrassing frequency.
I put aside Rahman Dahlan for special mention. He was in fact invited to be featured in Undilah. He accepted with glee because...well, because we were the shits. But on account of a comment he subsequently made about @n_izzah’s children, we de-invited him...
Displeased, he attacked the video upon release. He claimed that the Jabar The Hutt mascot in the video referred to Rosmah and deemed us subliminally subversive. He was half right - we did place metaphors in our videos - but he missed the crucial ones.
too was invited. But he turned it down on account of Namewee’s role in it. I argued with him that the rapper has an important voice and deserves to be represented but to no avail. Unlike Rahman, his objection was honest and ideological.
And so we arrive at a new Malaysia. I hope our country will never have to face the sort of fear that I saw in a decade of making political videos. And when we think on people who are re-positioning now, I think it fair to think on it with this context in mind.
Last thing - was Rahman Dahlan right to think we were subliminal? Of course he was. All good art is. But the most subliminal was not even Undilah but Citizens. Some day I might decode it for him, just so he’d know how fucking good we were.
