Somebody Really Dropped The Ball

Recently there has been campaigns including on Facebook to ban the movie New Village based on the trailer below and after an Op-Ed was published in the Utusan Malaysia.

Frankly I did not give a damn because the campaign was against the Cinema Chains that was supposed to show it and not the real responsible authorities like the LPF or FINAS who gave the screening license. However due to the Pressure by these campaigns finally the Responsible Ministers Datuk Zahid Hamidi and Datuk Ahmad Shabery Cheek has issued statements that the movie will be reviewed again as per the press statement in this article and this article.

However the following comment piqued my interest to watch the trailer for me to make an informed opinion on the matter ;

"  The Board will review the movie to see if it has any form of communist messages "

I do not know if the LPF reviewed the movies without the sub-titles, but to me the following clearly fits the bill.

It is said that the movie is about the MPAJA rather than the PKM, so the subject matter is not supposedly directly pro-communist but the following is the description given in the Youtube page.

"This film is dedicated to our forefathers, especially the 500,000 local Chinese forcing to be resettled in 480 New Village camps during 1948-1960 Emergency period in the Malay Peninsula."

However to the history deficient Malaysians who may not know it, the MPAJA stands for the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army and by 1948 there were no longer any Japanese Army to fight against, and the Brigg's Plan is clearly as follows ;

"Briggs' Plan was a military plan devised by British General Sir Harold Briggs shortly after his appointment in 1950 as Director of Operations in the anti-communist war in Malaya. The plan aimed to defeat the Malayan communists, who were operating out of rural areas as a guerrilla army, primarily by cutting them off from their sources of support amongst the population. To this end, a massive program of forced resettlement of Malayan peasantry was undertaken, under which about 500,000 people (roughly ten percent of Malaya's population) were eventually removed from the land and interned in guarded camps called "New Villages". "

In fact, by the time there only existed the PKM. So clearly there is creative license being used by the maker's of the movie, but then their intention needs to be questioned, NO?