Lampu merah mati
Malaysia,
2005, 87 min
Shown in 2005
CREDITS
- dir
-
Woo Ming Jin
- prod
-
Zan Azlee, Amir Muhammad
- scr
-
Woo Ming Jin
- cam
-
James Lee
- mus
-
Hardesh Singh
- cast
-
Patrick Teoh, Azmon Hassan
- source
-
Greenlight Pictures, 52, Sksyen 13/8, Greenville, KGSAAS, 40000 Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia. FAX: 6-03-55-10-4427. EMAIL: greenlightpic@gmail.com.
- premiere
-
World Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Woo Ming Jin in person.
OTHER
Known mainly for his prize-winning ironic short, Love for Dogs, with its slacker protagonist, Woo Ming Jin’s first feature is—to outsiders used to Hollywood stereotypes—a seemingly offbeat approach to a movie about terrorists. Set in a fictitious country, Woo’s film follows a group of ordinary-looking types who are shepherded by the police as they describe and reenact their terrorist deed to a group of journalists in and around their jungle headquarters. Although it may look strange, the on-site reenactment for the media and the public is commonly done for terrorism cases in Southeast Asia and South America. The film’s incident is not based on any real-life terrorist attack, but Woo’s approach was inspired after seeing photos of suspects of the Bali bombing reenacting their meetings on location, complete with large name tags around their necks. Shot in a verité style (by award-winning filmmaker James Lee), Woo’s film is an indictment not only of the terrorists but also the corruption of the authorities who pursue them. One of the terrorists, Kosovo, is released but then shot by the police to stop him from revealing the truth—a different truth from the rehearsed statement he gave to the press.
—Roger Garcia
FACTOID #134
The 1986 San Francisco International’s Discovering Mike Leigh was the director’s first retrospective in the U.S. According to the San Francisco Examiner, Festival Artistic Director Peter Scarlet compared the then-unknown Leigh to Yasujiro Ozu before his work had achieved international recognition; while the latter director had been considered ’too Japanese’ for global audiences, Leigh was considered ’too British.’
