This morning we had a showing of our documentary “The Hidden History of Johor Lama” organised by Think City here in Johor Bahru. Last year they hosted a showing of our first documentary “The Hidden History of Johor Bahru” and this time they found a larger venue and a larger audience. Today we were at the IPG Kampus Temenggong Ibrahim which is the local teacher training college. So, plenty of young minds to influence!
It is a very large campus and I think most visitors got lost finding the lecture theatre. We certainly got lost earlier in the week when we visited to test out the projection system. So, we asked them to put up some signage but I think it was designed for people who already knew where they were going. Unfortunately there were too many other events going on in Johor Bahru today so we lost quite a few of our potential audience and will have to try and arrange another showing somewhere else. Still, there must have been about 70 people here, so that was good.
Faezah Ayub introduced the event by describing the role of Think City in conserving/promoting Malaysian heritage. She asked the student teachers about their knowledge of local history and it was practically non-existent. We made this history documentary in part because there was little available in the English language for foreigners in Malaysia, but it seems that this topic wasn’t even well addressed in the local schools.
Didn’t get too many questions afterwards from the students while still seated, but some did come to chat with us later. Thankfully the feedback was quite positive and I think people were surprised at what we had achieved. Having said that, we did get some help from others. There were two people in the audience who helped us with the filming along the Johor River, and found locations for us which we had failed to find for ourselves. In the photo below are Shahrool Anuar (Nuar) and Asiyahtul Husna (Ula) from Panz Village who are official tour guides based in Johor Lama. We bumped into them earlier in the year when we were exploring Johor Lama to look for locations for our film. They have been very supportive of our efforts to promote local history and have offered to see if they can get our documentary shown elsewhere.
I have pinched a couple of photos from Facebook postings to complete this story. Here we have Nuar and Ula with Lawrence.
And here’s proof that I was there too!
Today we met a guy from the MultiMedia University in Iskandar, where they train aspiring film makers. So hopefully we might get the opportunity to show our film to them. We discovered in today’s venue that the sound balance was a bit off in places, so I think we may have to pay a sound engineer to sort this out for us. There’s only so much we can do ourselves. When you listen to the film on a computer, the sound balance seems fine, but as soon as you show it in different venues, little issues become multipled and really need sorting out. Pretty sure that the students at MMU would pick up on this.
Anyway, we have now had two public showings, and the audiences laughed in the right places both times so we’re happy! Making this film was a sort of personal passion project but it is really nice to be able to share it with others and know that we haven’t been wasting their time.
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