The production crew travelled to various locations around Sabah and Kuala lumpur. Some locations were only accessible by four-wheel-drive vehicles.
About 26 months ago, a couple of friend and I conceived a “crazy idea” of making a documentary film about the realities, values and aspirations of Sabahans in embracing, celebrating and preserving cultural diversity in Sabah. Unexpectedly, this humble social project ended up taking us nearly two years to complete, including 10 months of shooting in 16 locations in Sabah and Kuala Lumpur and four months of post-production work involving hundreds of locals from diverse cultural backgrounds.
The result is a 1 hour 45 minutes Finas-funded documentary film called KITA – Sabah Celebrating Diversity, which consists of three separate but interrelated sections that follows the real life stories of 10 ordinary Sabahans through whose lenses the audiences will experience the strength, beauty and “deliciousness” of a diverse society.
This article is about our journey of creating this documentary.
I was born in Papar, a small town about 40km south-west of Kota Kinabalu, known for its simplicity. My parents ran a typical grocery store, where almost all of our customers were local indigenous people.
I always felt that harmonious coexistence among different ethnic groups was something natural, until I moved back to Kota Kinabalu from abroad years ago and was shocked to find that racial and religious extremism was increasingly rampant in Malaysian society, especially in Peninsular Malaysia.
If it was not counterbalanced, Malaysia’s future would be bleak.
Therefore, in 2019, a few like-minded friends and I founded a non-profit organisation called Community Empowerment Initiative Sabah. One of our main projects was to establish a non-profit and non-partisan collaborative network of local faith and community-based organisations that work together to promote unity in diversity on project basis. This collaboration platform is now officially named Sabah Unity in Diversity Community Partners, or SUIDCP (www.suidcp.org).
Our first successful project was a community-initiated Malaysia Day celebration held on Sept 14, 2019 at the Kota Kinabalu Merdeka Square. Then the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world in March 2020, causing all our projects to be temporarily suspended.
However, this long break triggered me to contemplate the possibility of making a documentary film that would describe the reality of Sabah’s multi-ethnic society, which is often taken for granted by many Sabahans, and mostly unfamiliar and unknown by most Malaysians.
The Birth of ‘North Borneo Celebrating Diversity’ On Feb 10, 2021, I drafted a project proposal called North Borneo Celebrating Diversity. It was initially conceived as a six-episode documentary TV series. I then shared it with renowned documentary director Nova Goh and the owner of Videographics Productions Sdn Bhd, Lee Yen Phin.
Both of them agreed it would be a project worth doing. Due to the pandemic, Finas launched a funding programme called Borneo Pitch to assist local filmmakers in east Malaysia to get through the difficult period.
We submitted our project proposal to Finas and on July 31, 2021, we found out we were the last of 10 selected projects.
After securing Finas’ support, we had to gather a creative team. Since Nova is a pioneer in the local documentary industry with rich production experience and a stable team of collaborators, we quickly gathered a group of excellent local film industry elites to form our 18-person “dream team”, consisting of Nova as the overall director, and Kwan and Pentium Tee as co-directors.
Due to a limited budget, the entire creative team worked almost on a semi-voluntary basis during the 10 months of filming and nearly four months of post-production. The time and effort invested by the team were disproportionate to the compensation they received.
However, perhaps driven by a sense of mission, or a resilient and transcendent artistic worldview and value system, everyone seemed to enjoy the process.
Ten journeys, one aspiration
Compared to assembling a creative team, finding 10 “characters” and “stories” that were suitable and able to touch people’s hearts was even more difficult. Since the theme was the “diversity” of Sabah society, the characters in it must first be Sabahans (or long-term residents in Sabah who have become essentially localised), with “diverse” backgrounds.
At the same time, the “stories” of the characters must have depth, breadth, and a certain representation and inspiration.
As this documentary consists of three independent but related units: “diversity is strength”, “diversity is beautiful”, and “diversity is delicious”, the characters in “diversity is beautiful” must be artists, while those in “diversity is delicious” must be food enthusiasts or chefs, which posed an even greater challenge in casting.
In addition, in order to reflect Sabah’s rich social landscape relatively fairly and truthfully, we also tried to achieve a certain balance in the narration of race, religion, language, and even region within the limited characters, stories, and length.
All these almost harsh self-imposed conditions made the progress of our search for characters and stories extremely slow. Fortunately, we eventually succeeded in finding the 10 ideal characters and stories through various channels and coincidences.
Due to the special narrative structure of this documentary film, all the characters had no idea about the other characters’ stories during the filming process, nor were they even aware of the other characters’ identities and backgrounds.
Crossing mountains, enduring hardships This documentary started filming on Dec 21, 2021, and wrapped up on Sept 3, 2022. One reason for this lengthy period was the pandemic that disrupted the filming schedule. Another was our aim to cover several major festivals, including Christmas, Chinese New Year, Ramadan, Hari Raya, the Dragon Boat Festival, and the Harvest Festival.
In addition to the extended shooting period, our filming locations also covered a vast geographical area, including Kota Kinabalu, Donggongon, Papar, Tamparuli, Kiulu, Keningau, Tambunan, Kota Belud, Kota Marudu, Kundasang, Ranau, Pitas, Sandakan, Semporna, Salakan Island and Kuala Lumpur.
Some of the locations were challenging to access. We used a four-wheel-drive vehicle to cross mountains and enter Kampung Penulongon in the interior of Ranau three times. The village had no electricity, no running water, no gas, no modern toilets.
The filming team had to sleep in tents at night, prepare their meals using a gas stove and use the most primitive “toilets”. The experiences are just too difficult to describe in words.
During the nearly 10 months of filming, there were many unforgettable experiences and touching stories. For example, one character invited us to film her family’s traditional Indian wedding in a Hindu temple in Lok Kawi. Another character led us to visit a folk textile artist in the interior of Pitas, and several Muslim friends invited us to film the scenes of buka puasa in the Kota Kinabalu City Mosque (also known as the Floating Mosque).
Renaming to KITA – Sabah Celebrating DiversityWhen we were approaching the end of the production, it became clear that we needed a simpler and more catchy name for the film. North Borneo Celebrating Diversity was a mouthful.
It was when we began re-examining the original intention and the ultimate subject of our film that the phrase “KITA” appear in our mind.
Indeed, this film is not about any presumed ideology but instead it is about the reality of our people and our society seen through the eyes and lives of 10 “ordinary” Sabahans. With the KITA title, every Sabahan (or even every Malaysian) will know it is a documentary film about them, and yet after watching the film we hope the audiences will have an elevated experience and a much broader and deeper understanding of the meaning of KITA.
As one of our characters Pison Jaujip said at the end of the film, “...who we are as Sabahans”.
From the initial idea to the completion of the project, our KITA finally met its audience during our limited release in City Cineplex Cinema, Kota Kinabalu, last month. Some friends, curious about the time we took to finish the project asked “What is your purpose in doing this?”
The answer is in this documentary. It is also in the sincere friendship between you, me, him/her, our ancestors, and their friends and relatives of various ethnic groups.
During one of the post-screening dialogues, an audience member asked if we planned to screen KITA outside of Kota Kinabalu. At the time, I thought of the last paragraph of a speech delivered by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to the House of Commons on June 4, 1940, titled “We shall fight on the beaches.”
If we can get everyone’s support, “We shall show it in every city, we shall show it in every town and village, we shall show it in schools and community halls, we shall show it in other states, and we shall ultimately show it to everyone online.”
Those who wish to screen KITA – Sabah Celebrating Diversity can contact us at www.facebook.com/kitathefilm or www.suidcp.org.
