This ain't no rabbit hole

The idea for it started from Alice. I can’t remember her last name but this one time furniture factory kerani proved that you can make a difference. That whatever decision the government makes, you can determine whether or not it actually gets implemented. It’s that simple and almost unbelievably true.

  Her story and her successful campaign to oppose a billion-ringgit mega-incinerator in her backyard were chronicled in a film called “Alice lives here”. Watching Alice on screen is like seeing someone you know, like the kedai runcit guy down the road or the kakak next door transform into a rabble-rousing activist.

  Not just any kaki demo but a social hurricane, who overnight decided that she wasn’t just going to sit by and let the government turn her kampung in Broga into Malaysia’s largest garbage dump.
 
  Because that was the plan back in 2003. The government was going to build this monster of an incinerator because the landfills in Selangor were going to fill up in a few years. They tried putting the incinerator in Puchong. But the middle class residents put up such a fight so they had to look for another area. And that’s when they chose Kampung Broga. Probably because it was in a remote part of Semenyih and maybe because they thought them orang kampung could easily be appeased.
  
  But no one reckoned on Alice. Which is why the incinerator project was cancelled sometime in 2004.

  That’s why the film was so powerful. It showed that you didn’t have to take shit the kerajaan was shovelling out to you sitting down. You could actually get up, throw it right back at them AND make them take back.

   And the most important part about the film was that it was actually made. That there were people out there who were willing to shell out money and help make a film about a story in our collective lives that needed to be documented.

  So when I saw “Alice lives here” at the 2005 (I think, please correct me if i'm wrong) Freedom Film Fest, I told myself that if I ever came a across a story like hers I would do a film on it. Because such stories need to be seen.