Punggok Rindukan Bulan

27th Vancouver Intl Film Festival 2008

Title: This Longing (Malaysia, 122 min.)
Original Title: Punggok Rindukan Bulan
Series: Dragons and Tigers: The Cinema of East Asia
North American Premiere

Screening Date/time:
Sunday, October 5th 9:00pm
Vancity Theatre

Tuesday, October 7th 12:15pm
Empire Granville 7 Theatre 1

About the film:
Sidi is a scrappy boy living in a
condemned tenement. His escapades
revolve around avoiding school and
hallucinatory scenes of night fishing with
his father. Malaysian director Azharr
Rudin's first film is a formally daring
mood piece that meditates on the
meaning of leaving one's past behind.

Directed By: Azharr Rudin
EXEC PROD: Tan Chui Mui
PROD: Amir Muhammad
SCR/ED: Azharr Rudin
CAM: Sidi Saleh
Cast: Saeful Nazhif Satria, Sahronizam Noor, Maya Karin, Salehuddin Abu Bakar, Sharifah Amani

A poignant, mysterious memory piece from the impressive Malaysian independent cinema, newcomer Azharr Rudin's Malay-language This Longing tells (at least) two stories. Narratively as well as stylistically daring, the film has one constant, the decrepit housing estate in the southern Malaysian city of Johor Baharu, just across from flourishing Singapore. This place is a character in its own right, a home for people left far behind by South East Asian prosperity bubble.

Young Sidi lives in the estate, and nominally goes to school. But, since his mother left abruptly, he seems more interested in skateboarding with his friends and night fishing with his father. Sidi's father may be a security guard, but spends most of his time hanging with his buddies. Sidi's adventures include not quite flirting with a girl he fancies; setting up his friend with a local transvestite prostitute, and unsuccessfully avoiding the curious attentions of a local would-be tough.

Less a through-composed plot than a series of linked vignettes, the film transfuses seemingly ordinary moments in Sidi's life with an uncanny light, and invites the viewer to make the necessary chronological and causal links. When the story breaks and restarts about 80 minutes in, as Riza, a former inhabitant of the tenement, returns to find her presumably estranged father, we are challenged to re-imagine what we've seen before.
-- Shelly Kraicer, Film Programmer of Vancouver Film Festival.