ABSTRACT
Malay cinema in Singapore For more than twenty years in its fifty years as an independent nation, Singapore did not have a film industry. The best that one could say about this lack is that it was a transitional phase in which a dormant Singapore cinema was waiting for the right moment to rise up. This occurred in the 1990s, beginning with an outburst of short films (Harvey 2007, 266-8), and with long feature film productions by mid-decade (eric Khoo’s Mee Pok Man, released in 1995, is generally seen to be the milestone). Historically, Singapore had a film industry focussed on the production of Malay-language films. Singapore functioned as the Mecca of Malay film production. The first Malay talkie Leila Majnun was filmed in Singapore in 1933 (Uhde and Uhde 2000, 3). However, an industry did not flourish until after the Second World War. Two production studios, Cathay-Keris and Shaw Brothers’ Malay Film Productions, dominated the entire feature film production of Singapore at the time. Over 200 Malay films were produced in total. Its heyday extended from the 1950s to at least the mid-1960s. This coincided with the period when Singapore’s political destiny was very much connected with the independence movement in Malaya and the emerging nation state of Malaysia with which Singapore merged in 1963.
