Kota Kinabalu: Award-winning filmmaker Nadira Ilana, who has just completed her debut feature film Ballad of the Half-Boy ahead of its cinema release next year, said the film industry presented its own structural barriers, particularly for stories rooted outside the Klang Valley.
“Malaysian cinemas are actually designed around Peninsular Malaysia,” she said. “Not just Peninsular Malaysia, but Malay-male stories. The cinema landscape is very much embedded in a Klang Valley bubble way of telling stories.”
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Nadira, who splits her time between Kuala Lumpur and Sabah, said she became a filmmaker because she fell in love with Borneo cinema, which she described as a space that once felt safe and full of possibility.
“But that somehow gave me these delusions of grandeur that a career in film was possible,” she said. “If I could meet my younger self now, I would just hug her and cry, because it is just not entirely the case.”
She said the misrepresentation of Sabahans on screen ran deeper than box office numbers. Pointing to the film Takluk: Lahad Datu, which depicts the 2013 Tanduo incursion, she said the production came to Sabah after clearing approvals through the relevant authorities and the Sabah Tourism Board, yet was reportedly advised not to use Sabahan accents.
“Peninsula Malaysia thinks that the best people to play Borneans on screen are always West Malaysians,” Nadira said. “They are still uncomfortable with our dialect, with the way we talk. They do not know what Sabah people actually look like.”
She said Sabahan musicians faced a comparatively lower barrier to national recognition because singing without a regional accent was possible, but filmmakers working in dialogue-driven drama had no such workaround.
Despite those frustrations, Nadira placed hope in young Sabahan short filmmakers, pointing out that the format allowed them to develop an authentic voice free of commercial pressure.
She encountered promising young directors whose work unknowingly mirrored Peninsula Malaysian or Hollywood conventions, often without them realising it.
“I look at them and ask: Why does your story sound like a Malay film?” she said.
“They do not realise they are copying other people. But to be internationally recognised, all people want is for you to be yourself, to give them access to a part of the world or a human experience nobody has ever heard before. As artist Yee I-Lann puts it, go deep local to go global.”
She said Ballad of the Half-Boy would be a real test when it reaches cinemas, noting the broader question of whether local audiences would pay for a ticket or wait for a streaming release.
On policy, Nadira acknowledged progress already made, citing the collaboration between the Sabah Film and Video Association and TV Sabah at the Kadazan Dusun Cultural Association this year as an encouraging sign, including the installation of a large LED screen showcasing local film trailers.
“The first time I went to a Sabahan film premiere, I was jumping, hugging my friends, crying,” she said. “And then to see Sabahan film trailers on that LED screen … that was great.”
She said 10 Star Cinemas should be treated as a proper cultural institution and home for Sabahan films, not just a commercial venue.
Nadira also flagged artificial intelligence as a policy concern, warning that enthusiasm for the technology was outpacing awareness of its risks to society, particularly for women and young people.
“I take the social responsibility of a filmmaker very seriously,” she said. “We have to remember that in the arts, we are trying to develop an intellectually capable Sabahan society.”
She said inclusive policymaking had to reach beyond visible communities to those on the margins and that the creative industry also needed to be made safer for women.
She had filed police reports on several occasions after being stalked and receiving death threats.
“These policies have to consider not just sustainability in terms of whether we are getting paid,” Nadira said. “You also have to pay attention to who is not being heard.
Who is not at the table right now? Those are the people we need to bring to the forefront.”
She also called on Daily Express to consider dedicating writers to critically cover the arts, arguing that the ability to meaningfully analyse music, film and culture had eroded in the age of streaming.
“People do not know how to think about art anymore,” Nadira said. “If Daily Express had dedicated arts writers who could break things down critically, that would do so much not just for artists, but for readers. Young people should know that is a possible job.”
