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With a humongous budget for Malaysian standards of RM6 million, Pulang is one of the most advertised and most ambitious film coming from the country, in a mainstream approach that seems to draw as much as possible from Hollywood aesthetics. Let us take things from the beginning though.

The script is based on an actual love story that begun in Malaysia during the 30’s and stretched for more than six decades, although the director took a number of liberties with it, as the actual footage in the finale of the film suggests. This love story begins in 1939, in Serkam, Malacca, and revolves around Othman, a local fisherman who falls in love with Thom, a girl who visits the place in order to take care of her dying grandmother. The two of them fall in love instantly, and after a while, they get married, despite the fact that both are very poor.

Why are most mainstream film awards crap? I don’t know; don’t ask me.

The Festival Filem Malaysia (Malaysian film awards) continues to be a baffling, mind-boggling affair year after year. They once snubbed one of the most important Malaysian filmmakers, Yasmin Ahmad, with the excuse that her films continue to show nothing new or different. Like many other awards events, the decisions can sometimes be rather weird. For example, for this year’s awards, probably the worst film released this year, the laughable horror film Congkak, picked up four nominations, including, gulp, Best Director. That itself, is a horror story. It also got one for Best Sound, when the direction for the sound seemed to be to make everything as loud as possible.

But among the jury this year is independent filmmaker Amir Muhammad, whose mainstream film, Susuk, co-directed with Naeim Ghalili, picked up 8 nominations, including Best Cinematography (by Devan R.

My repeated reliance on Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Rouge seminar address “In Search of New Genres and Directions for Asian Cinema” belies not so much laziness on my part as the fact that Hsiao-hsien’s suggestion of the potential values (and pitfalls) of using “local elements … firmly rooted in local culture"—specifically when creating horror genre films—remains not only salient advice for East Asian and Southeast Asian filmmakers but a great handle for understanding genre films emerging from these foreign territories. If said genre films can draw upon the culturally-specific wealth of their respective countries in combination with an expression of national anxieties, then you have the makings of an authentic piece of horror genre that might meet an effective U.S. reception.

This is the precarious challenge successfully endeavored by Malaysian filmmaker Amir Muhammad with his long-awaited “horror musical” Susuk (co-directed with Naeim Ghalili, from an original story...