RIFLE RANGE BOY

Pendatang (Malaysian Cantonese, Malay, Newcomer; 2023) Director: Ken-Kin Ng In the old days, most houses will have a single bathroom. Two, if you are in the upper middle class. Bedrooms were hardly to go by, usually reserved for the female members of the family for modesty. The males would usually rough it out wherever there was space. This was especially so when relatives visited the household. Everywhere they lay their pillow, it was a sleeping place.  Fast forward to 1990 and beyond. Even siblings find it difficult to share living space. They talk about wanting personal space and wanting privacy. The concept of her sharing and accommodation for a fellow roommate or a sibling has suddenly become an alien concept. Hell hath no fury for a person whose personal toiletry or cosmetics are used without consent.  Outside the confines of the home, we were a tolerant lot. We did not tolerate but instead accepted each other with each other's idiosyncratic ways of eating or worshipping...

Censor (2021) Written and directed: Prano Bailey-Bond Memory can be as much a boon or a curse to humankind. The race has progressed thus far because we can learn and put into memory what we have learnt. With that ability, we can reproduce it as and when needed.  But then, therein lies the problem. Keeping other memories, especially the unpleasant ones and those affecting the matters of the heart, can be unsettling and counterproductive. Just for how long one wants to hold a grudge for hurt caused? Does anger have an expiry date, upon which scores are cleared dry on the slate ? That is why our mind has an in-built pruning mechanism to cut off unpleasant memories that can stunt our progress. Sadly, a small group of people do not forget or forgive. They must be the most unhappiest of the people on the planet. Perhaps, the next serial killer too! Even at best, Man uses less than 10% of his brain connexions. Scientists are perplexed by the many dormant areas of the brain and wonder if t...

An Insignificant Man (2017) Director: Khushboo Ranka & Vinay Shukla Another highlight of the Malaysian Freedom Film Festival is the screening of the biopic of a taxman who decided to change the landscape of politics after a bitter event in the course of his work. Arvind Kejriwal, at a time when Anna Hazare started fasting to make people realise the widespread of corruption in Indian politics, started a new political party by the name of Aap Aadmi Party (AAP). Using the logo of a broom as its party symbol, he had hoped to clean Indian politics. Much to everybody's astonishment, this newbie did manage to oust the long-standing Chief Minister of Delhi, Sheila Dixit of the Congress Party. This documentary tells in a much convincing manner, the trials and tribulations of an everyday man who is a greenhorn to the mind-boggling world of politics in his single-minded zest to fight cancer the society. He comes to realise that it is not easy to change the society. The communi...