6horts #5: Kamunting

Gentle, easy-going Or Kia moves from the countryside to Kuala Lumpur to work for his cousin and best friend Ah Soon, a mid-level gangster and enforcer. While Or Kia works hard to put a sister through school, Ah Soon cares for an unstable girlfriend prone to mysterious disappearances. As they both sink deeper into a nocturnal world of debts, drugs, and betrayal, Or Kia's loyalties are strained when Ah Soon falls out of favor with the bosses and tries to escape the business.

A man loses his passport.

Set in a dystopian Malaysia in which different races are forbidden to mix. A Chinese family moves into their new house to find a scared Malay girl still hiding in it. Should they get rid of her or try to smuggle her back to safety?

Short film about a difficult journey.

In a mosque, shoes are stolen.

A leisurely picnic takes a tragic turn when Ramlah sees a mysterious figure abducts her son and disappears. Shortly after, she begins encountering unexplained hauntings but her husband doesn`t believe her. But time and time again, clues lead her to believe that her son is close by and still alive, as she races against time to find him before it`s too late.

Lips to Lips is an urban comedy featuring four intertwined stories about desire, all set during one day in Kuala Lumpur. A suicidal young man mourns the death of his stepmother who had come into fatal contact with an apple. A bubbly radio DJ catches her fiancé in an unexpected sexual encounter on the eve of their wedding night. A dapper restaurant owner falls for his doppelganger. A bookshop clerk resorts to black magic to get the attention of a girl with a fetish for cookbooks. Lips to Lips is Malaysian filmmaker Amir Muhammad’s directorial debut. It is Malaysia’s first independent digital feature film that marked the beginning of the Malaysian independent film movement. It paved the way for the Malaysian New Wave’s unique brand of DV (digital video) cinema, whose leading figures have developed a niche of dedicated film audiences.

A documentary crew and a team of amateur ghost hunters go to investigate a haunted hotel. How many will be left alive?

On the night of 18 October 1987, a soldier ran amok with an M16 in the area of Chow Kit, Kuala Lumpur. Due to the thorny circumstances of the time and place, his amok triggered a citywide panic and rumours of racial riots. Why did he do it? Why were Malaysians so jittery at the time? And what happened next? "The Big Durian" speaks to 23 Malaysians (some real, some fictional) to find out.

A travel documentary essay, interspersed with specially composed songs, about the early life and legacy of Chin Peng, exiled leader of the banned Communist Party of Malaya.

This split-screen documentary by a Malaysian director chronicles the shooting of the Indonesian film Gie (2005) in the middle of 2004, which is also when the country is undergoing its first direct presidential elections. Opinions from the cast, crew and extras of the film are sought on politics, filmmaking and the national myths of the past and present.

Against the bustling backdrop of Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown, a Malay-Muslim narrator reminisces about a teenage relationship between himself and an ethnic Chinese classmate. Pangyau , the Cantonese word for friend, is not just the story of a close friendship, but a prism through which the writer gets to examine his feelings about the the ways in which race and religion have been used in the national socio-political discourse.

The world is overrun by mind-controlling aliens called the Sky Beasts. Six people hide out in an abandoned building. But when one of them is exposed to the aliens, paranoia among them proves to be just as deadly as any threat from the sky.

Cut off from civilisation, a single mother puts her children on high alert when they bring home a young girl caked in clay. She tells of spirits and spirit hunters, but these are not mere superstitions. As more strangers show up on her doorstep, she quickly finds another reason to fear the forest.

Short film about a murderess.

Ikram brings home his classmates to feed Julia, his blood-sucking stepmum. When Julia starts flirting with a classmate Ikram has been secretly admiring, he flies into a rage of jealousy.