Edmund Yeo’s first feature film, “River of Exploding Durians”, had its world premier at the Tokyo International Film Festival on Friday of its opening weekend. He brought and producer, Ming Jin Woo and a few of his cast, Koe Shern, Joey Leong and Daphne Low to Tokyo to promote and celebrate the films first bow. Their excitement was palpable.
 
Daphne Low exclaimed, “This film, I think, established a lot of firsts. First of all, I was able to come to Japan. And also this film was the first Malaysian that was invited to the competition section of the Tokyo International Film Festival. And also this was the first feature length film for Edmund.

 
Yeo spends most of his time in Japan, but returned to Malaysia to make “River of Exploding Durians”, a heartfelt movie describing the struggles of coming of age in a small town where a rare earth plant is being built – a potential harbinger of an environmental disaster. The film follows the romance between high schoolers Mie Ann (Joey Leong) and Ming (Koe Shern). Their teacher, Ms. Lim (Zhu-Zhi-Ying) starts to instill them with some radical ideas about history, leading them to become active in trying to stop the rare earth plant from being built.
 
River of Exploding Durians brings up a lot of specifically Malaysian issues and history, but also talks to larger issues of how a people define themselves and their history and what the limits of action and protest should be.
 
Edmund explained, “I do feel strongly about history. A lot of the historical events portrayed in the film are unspoken history that’s not officially in textbooks. They’re not spoken about due to political reasons. So for me personally, I believe a lot in the power of cinema. To some people, movies just might be for entertainment. But for me, I believe that we use cinema to remember the world. So I always believe that cinema is forever. So if I can put all these historical events that are not spoken aloud in this film of mine, would people remember? So this is my intention – to help people remember all these events.”
 

 
He continued, “For me, I basically wanted to ask questions in my film. I didn’t want to openly complain or condemn things – because I feel that people have been doing that a lot – on facebook. For me it’s real tiring, going online everyday – and you know, it’s just people complaining about the government or people complaining about the opposition. I just want to ask questions. I think it’s a very Malaysian thing that we always complain about things. I think it’s very stupid. I think we should be thinking more. So, I just want to ask questions so we can contemplate. And the reason why I wanted to bring historical events from the past, like the Thai incident, the Filipino incident, is because they were in our neighboring countries and there are some parallels between what happened then and some stuff that happened to us. So, my question is; if we continue doing what we are doing, is history going to repeat itself or should we try something different so we can be more hopeful?”
 
Edmund leaves the questions open for viewers to contemplate.
 
When queried about the meaning of the durians of the title, the sometimes-reviled fruit of Southeast Asia, he answered, “Durians play a very important role in Malaysia. To us it’s the king of fruits. That’s what we call it. But it’s very mixed. Some people like it and some people don’t. To some people it’s very smelly on the outside – a strange smell – but inside it’s very soft and sweet. So I thought it’s representative of Malaysians. We are strange outside, but inside we can be very friendly and warm and nice.”
His crew laughed knowingly with his metaphor and description of the Malaysian character.
 
“River of Exploding Durians”

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