Searching for Identities: Lau Kek Huat’s Films and Memories of the Malayan Communist Struggle

This paper focuses on two films by the Chinese Malaysian filmmaker Lau Kek Huat-Absent Without Leave (2017) and Boluomi (2019)-and discusses how they scrutinise memories of the Malayan Communist Party’s struggle while confronting the official, state-sanctioned version, which is intertwined with ethnicbased,preferential practices espoused by the ruling regime. Furthermore, these films interrogate ethnic Chinese Malayan identities-including the communists’identities in particular-by highlighting their pluralism, as torn between Chinese and Malayan nationalism. Through this analysis, I argue that these films also reflect an “authorial intention” to locate and negotiate his diasporic ethnic Chinese identity vis-à-vis Malaysia’s ethnocentric socio-political system.