When I make documentaries, I am inspired by the room at the beginning of every haunted-house movie that the protagonist is told (by a real-estate agent or neighbor or previous occupant) in the first reel NOT to go into. You just know that something important (read: bloody) will happen there by the film’s end. So I am inspired by the events in Malaysian history that we are encouraged not to know about, such as the Communist resistance of the post-war years or the more recent challenges to our traditionally monolithic political establishment. Conceptually, I prefer not to feature newsmakers but rather people who are not normally featured in ostensibly political documentaries. So yes, I am interested in taboos (how boring it would be to live in a country without them!) and counter-hegemonic terrains. Or to keep things simple: that terrible room!

I also like jokes.

I have not made any documentaries since 2008. But I have been thinking of these three ideas for some time.

Who is Kassim Selamat?

This idea (ripped off from reading the synopsis of The Sweetest Sound in which Alan Berliner arranges to meet twelve other men named Alan Berliner) is to see how many different Kassim Selamats there are. (It’s not a popular name but is not improbable, either. There might be a few dozen.) Some of them might indeed be lawyers, magistrates, and musicians; others could be… I don’t even want to speculate; I want to be taken totally by surprise.

The footage of that iconic movie question “Who is Kassim Selamat?” can be played before we meet each new real-life “character.”

Aside from their name, would they share any other traits? Depending on who the men are, the documentary can give insights into class identity, the urban/rural disparity, the generation gap. Who knows? We must first find the answer to that burning question of who Kassim Selamat is.

The Trial of Ethel Proudlock

In 1911 a sensational murder trial took place in Kuala Lumpur. A woman named Ethel Proudlock was accused of killing her lover, William Steward, at her home while her husband was away. She had earlier said that Steward had tried to rape her but her testimony unraveled due to various inconsistencies. She was found guilty and sentenced to death. (The sultan of that state pardoned her, and she had to leave Malaya in disgrace.)

I am intrigued by this case because her husband, William Proudlock, was then the acting headmaster of the boys’ school Victoria Institution, which I attended (a few decades later, of course). The murder remains one of the more colorful episodes from my school’s history. (This case was fictionalized by W. Somerset Maugham in the short story “The Letter,” which was then filmed with Bette Davis.)

All this was scandalous because a member of the colonial class had her torrid private life laid bare. Unusually, the judge closed the public gallery during the trial—most likely to stop the “natives” from gawking at the secrets of their supposed social betters. But Ethel herself was a victim of racial prejudice: as a Eurasian rather than a fully white woman, she had never totally “belonged.”

What I propose to do is to shoot a somewhat surreal thing on the present-day grounds of Victoria Institution, a school whose very name was meant to commemorate colonial glory. There could be a ghostly figure representing Ethel. Every single line you HEAR will come from the written records of that time: the trial transcripts, newspaper reports, and journals kept by the colonial administrators. They will reveal a lot about the colonial mindset of British Malaya. But we will SEE only the post-colonial reality in which English is not the medium of instruction: the Union Jack has been replaced by the Malaysian flag, and so on.

The people who “say” these lines today are, as far as possible, the present-day students and teachers of the school. It might end up being a series of non sequiturs. Since it will thus be “acted,” it would not qualify as a conventional documentary.

I have no idea what it would be like; I think of the staginess of Derek Jarman, or of the Thai villagers “acting out” a story in Mysterious Object at Noon. The juxtaposition of past/present, colonial/post-colonial might create some pithy moments.

The Jews of Malaysia

The Malay-Muslim population of Malaysia is regularly fed hysterical paranoia by some of our religious and political leaders when it comes to Jews. In the mosque sermons and on TV news, it won’t be unusual to hear about “Jewish conspiracies to weaken Muslims”—regarding everything from smoking to the entertainment industry. Ironically (or perhaps not) most Malay-Muslims have never knowingly met a Jew in their life.Jews have become a convenient bogey to distract the populace from the moral and political failings of our leadership. Whenever Israel brutally attacks Palestinians, this becomes the signal for yet another round of anti-Jewish sentiment—and this is not restricted to just one political party. One of the most vehemently anti-Jewish personalities is former Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, but those from the opposition parties (especially those who flaunt their Islamist credentials) are often the same.

Anti-Jewish tracts like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Henry Ford’s The International Jew are prominently displayed in some mainstream bookshops, while works by anti-Zionist Jewish thinkers are far less known.

My proposal for this documentary is to have a group of actors pretending to be a bunch of rabbis on holiday. This has literally never happened before. They will go to the most conservative Malay-Muslim areas and we will record the reactions of people. Each rabbi will also have a video camera (like an enthusiastic tourist) to record his interactions with people.

Admittedly this might seem like Borat or Bruno. But the visual absurdity of it might just create some sublime moments—like that opening scene of Santa Claus getting chased in Divine Intervention.