椰林月 (MOON OVER MALAYA) (Singapore, 1957, 秦剑 Chun Kim & 楚原 Chor Yuen)

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The elegiac 椰林月 (MOON OVER MALAYA) provides a fitting coda to the [Nanyang Trilogy] series. The title, of course, hints at the elegy that constitutes the tragic and poetic heart of the film but it also confirms the motif of the journey — the moon as a metaphorical traveler who wanders all over Malaya (a critic at the time wrote that after seeing the film, ‘one feels like one has traveled all over Malaya’)… 椰林月 (MOON OVER MALAYA) [is also] an allegory of the left-right conflict within the Chinese community. —Stephen Teo, Asian Film Archive

In 椰林月 (MOON OVER MALAYA), Ngok Ming is an idealistic young man, passionate about promoting and developing education in Malaya. He approaches a wealthy Chinese businessman to raise funds for building schools and meets his daughter, the young heiress Cho-lin. After a whirlwind romance, Ngok Ming and Cho-lin get married.

However, Ngok Ming struggles to balance his passion for education and performing his duty of managing the family business. As conflicts between the characters escalate, Ngok Ming and Cho-lin are forced to make decisions that will change their lives forever.

Film critic and scholar Stephen Teo writes about how MOON OVER MALAYA compares to the other films in the “Nanyang Trilogy,” particularly in regards to its focus on the subject matter of education and its relationship with the economy. Teo notes:

The flashback structure immediately reveals the auteur connection to BLOOD VALLEY, both films written and directed by Chun Kim (with the help of Chor Yuen)… however, what distinguishes MOON OVER MALAYA is the subject matter of Chinese education as the underlying desire of the lead character and the resulting emotional conflict within the family… The ideological centre of the film is the conflict between education and business (education is shown as the needy underdog always asking for donations while business is depicted as antipathetic to education). Education and business are traditionally two spheres of vital interest to the Chinese community. The film rightly presupposes a theme of education as the one subject of most concern to the Chinese overseas. It also portrays the Chinese as dominant in the economy.

Teo also highlights MOON OVER MALAYA’s lingering effect of “psychological heartache” due to its “propensity to resuscitate and project screen memories of the bitter kind,” thereby setting it apart from the other two films in the “Nanyang Trilogy.” He writes:

[MOON OVER MALAYA’s] psychological associations of the father-and-son conflict, and the allegorical left-right struggle for the soul of Malaya and Singapore (not to mention the struggle to establish Chinese-language education as a right in the new nations of Singapore and Malaysia) make it the most meaningful of the three films.

南洋三部曲 (THE NANYANG TRILOGY) is a triptych of films filmed in Singapore and Malaysia that was produced by the Kong Ngee Company in 1957. The films contained within this trilogy are 椰林月 (MOON OVER MALAYA), 血染相思谷 (BLOOD STAINS THE VALLEY OF LOVE), and 唐山阿嫂 (CHINA WIFE). These films were notable in their time for jumpstarting the careers of teen idols Patrick Tse Yin, Pasty Kar Ling, and Nam Hung.

The Kong Ngee Company began shooting the “Nanyang Trilogy” towards the end of 1956. All three films are set in Singapore and Malaya (the latter name was in current usage at the time). Both were British colonies, though in 1956, when the films were shot, British rule was about to end in the Malayan Peninsula. As historian and critic Stephen Teo notes: “The term [‘Nanyang’] refers to Singapore and Malaya, though the Chinese generally use it to refer to Southeast Asia as a whole. That ‘Nanyang’ is practically synonymous with Singapore and Malaya in the trilogy signifies their amorphousness as national entities during this period… The trilogy evokes a nostalgia that alludes to [their] common colonial experience… Thus, the Nanyang Trilogy can be seen as an early example of cross-border or transnational cinema. Nanyang… therefore [signifies] transmutable nations and boundless borders, a transnational state of globalism under colonialism.”

椰林月 (MOON OVER MALAYA) was restored in Singapore in 2018 by L’Immagine Ritrovata in collaboration with the Asian Film Archive. The new digital restorations of the “Nanyang Trilogy” titles are accompanied by a 118-page PDF booklet, published by AFA, which delineates the founding and history of the Kong Ngee Company, the making of the “Nanyang Trilogy,” and the Trilogy’s historical significance and cultural impact over 60 years later.

椰林月 (MOON OVER MALAYA)
(Singapore, 1957)

Director: Chun Kim 秦剑 & Chor Yuen 楚原

  • 91 minutes
  • 35mm
  • Black & white
  • Sound
Distribution Format/s: DSL/Downloadable 1080 .mp4 file on server

Published By: Asian Film Archive

Institutional Price: $500

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