In his poetic and intelligent feature directorial debut, Chris Chong Chan Fui improbably elevates karaoke videos into the realm of allegory. But the film is far from a treatise on the art of music videos. Instead, it concerns a young man named Betik (Zahiril Adzim) and his illusions regarding what it means to come home.
Indeed, homecoming is the major theme. Though the film is not autobiographical, this is clearly a personal work. Chong is a former Toronto resident who started his filmmaking career here, working for the Images Film Festival and eventually winning this Festival's Best Canadian Short Film award for two consecutive years. He has since moved back to Malaysia permanently, and Karaoke is his first work made wholly in his native homeland. His return to Kota Kinabalu thus helped inspire this narrative, though he manages to keep a controlled emotional distance from the subject.
Karaoke videos act here as a metaphor for how fantasy is projected upon patently false images of beauty and perfection. Likewise, Betik has an idealized view of his return home to rural Malaysia from Kuala Lumpur: his mother happily receiving her son back, and his eventually taking over the family karaoke bar. But once he is there, reality proves to be starkly different than what he had imagined.
The screening takes place Monday, September 14th at 5:30 PM at the Yonge and Dundas AMC. Winner will need to pick up their tickets in advance at the Sutton Place Hotel. The first person to email me here gets them.
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