Living on a prayer!

A Malaysian documentary on the issue of
statelessness among Filipino migrants in Sabah.

Living Stateless (Di Ambang) (2014)
Created by Matthew Fillmore

Like stray animals, they are shooed. They bring the value of their property down. There are poor. There are stateless. Nobody wants them. They are the stateless people of Sabah.

While the rest of the country would like to think they are heading to be a developed country by 2020, this fringe part of the state has been battling to get rid of this group of people originally from the Philippines who are neither Filipinos nor are they Malaysians.

Without proper documentations, the elders cannot secure jobs, the children cannot get a decent education, no one gets immunisation and medical attention. They show the resilience of the human spirit and are the emblem of the never-say-die attitude of the human race. They live scrapping on discards, monetise trash and perform clandestine menial tasks. Some build up enough courage to rent a shack to cramp up their families. Children become creative creating games with garbage. A roller of an ergonomic chair is a pushcart; a discarded wheel is play-toy, and somebody's trashed plush toy is their life-long buddy.

Every stateless person has a sob story to tell as they ponder aimlessly into their future in which they do not foresee any ray of hope. The authorities try to expel them now and then. Undocumented immigrants are occasionally repatriated but like mushroom after rain, they keep on coming back. For them, even though they are treated like lepers here, life is still better in Sabah. There is economic activity. They have a chance to feed their family. In the southern islands of Philippines, there is nothing, only Abu Sayyaf and pandemonium.

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