THE BIG DURIAN
Malaysia, 2003
Director: Amir Muhammad
Based on the events of October 1987, one of the most controversial periods of the country’s recent history, The Big Durian is the first Malaysian movie to explicitly address local politics.
A multi-lingual semi-documentary that covers the ‘thorny issues’ of race, religion, official harassment, political demagoguery, the judiciary, the media and even 80s pop music, this seriocomic movie takes as its starting-point a soldier running amok in the heart of Kuala Lumpur, and asks its respondents: “Do you remember the time when…?”
Screenplay:
Amir Muhammad
Cinematography:
Woo Ming Jin
Editing:
Terence Raj
Music:
Hardesh Singh
Principal Cast:
Anne James, Farish A. Noor, Elizabeth Wong, Namron, Low Ngai Yuen, Patrick Teoh
Production:
Doghouse 73 Pictures
DVD / colour / 75 min
Director's bio-note:
Amir Muhammad was born in 1972 in Kuala Lumpur. He has a degree in Law but does not use it, prefering instead to be a freelance journalist for the print and online media. In 1995 he took a summer filmmaking course at New York University.
In 2000 he made Malaysia’s first digital feature Lips to Lips, which traveled to over a dozen festivals around the world, including Hong Kong and Deauville. He won the Best Asian Digital Short two years in a row at the Singapore International Film Festival.