It is rare for films from the small Malaysian cinema industry to make an impact internationally, mainly because the majority of them are rather clumsy melodramas, broad comedies and formulaic musicals made for local consumption.
Therefore, it is a double tragedy that Yasmin Ahmad, one of the few Malaysian directors to make a name on the world stage, has died aged 51 after suffering a stroke and undergoing surgery for a cerebral haemorrhage.
Ahmad was part of a new generation of film-makers who reflected the wide ethnic and cultural diversity of her country and the lives and dreams of its young people. Stylistically, her principal influences were Yasujiro Ozu and Douglas Sirk, although she created her own western and oriental mixture.
Her films challenged ethnic stereotypes, and she was openly against any type of fundamentalism and racism, making it her life's work to support minority rights. Unsurprisingly, her feature films were disliked by the regime in Malaysia, a conservative, mostly Muslim country, for tackling taboo subjects such as inter-racial relations and teenage angst. In fact, the second, and perhaps most renowned of her six features, Sepet (2004), was banned in Malaysia, until Ahmad agreed to make eight cuts.
Sepet (which could be translated as "slit eyes"), about a relationship between a Chinese boy and a Malay girl, touched the sensitive nerve of race in Malaysia, where the memory of the terrible 1969 riots between Chinese and Malays is still strong. Ahmad, who was married to a Chinese man, made the film for $400,000 and shot it in Ipoh, where Chinese and Malay communities live in close proximity.
Ahmad was born in Kampung Bukit Treh in Muar, Johor, the oldest of three children of a musician father and theatre director mother. She was educated in England and gained a degree in arts and psychology at Newcastle University. Film was far from her mind when she got a job at IBM as a marketing representative, before moving into advertising as a copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather.
In 1993, she joined the advertising agency Leo Burnett in Kuala Lumpur, where she became an influential executive creative director and for whom she made ads for Petronas, the national oil and gas company.
Ahmad is survived by her husband, Abdullah Tan Yew Leong, a Chinese ad agency creative director.
Yasmin Ahmad, film director and screenwriter, born 1 July 1958; died 25 July 2009
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