PETRONAS | TAN HONG MING IN LOVE | 2008
The Filming Had Ended, But the Camera Kept Rolling / PETRONAS "TAN HONG MING IN LOVE"
A seven-year-old boy who wasn't even supposed to be the subject of the shoot ended up winning Malaysia's first-ever Gold Lion at Cannes. No script, none at all.
The problem
The setting is Malaysia in 2007, the year the country marked its 50th anniversary of independence. The national oil company PETRONAS had a tradition of airing long-form commercials to mark four yearly milestones: the Chinese, Malay, and Indian New Years, plus Independence Day. Over the years this had become something the whole country looked forward to as an annual event.
The insight
The project started out simply as asking schoolchildren about friendship. The interview with Tan Hong Ming had already wrapped, and he had already answered that his best friend was "the boy wearing a songkok." But the crew found him amusing and kept following him around, and when someone casually asked, "Do you have a girl you like?", things took an unscripted turn. It wasn't something you could have planned to capture.
The idea
Hong Ming admitted there was a girl in his class he liked. The crew scrambled to find her and sat her down in front of the camera, and she confirmed that she considered him her boyfriend. The director simply asked Hong Ming to walk her back to the classroom, and while filming the two of them walking away hand in hand, she reportedly whispered to the cameraman, "Make sure you get this." The film ends with a single line: "Our children don't see colour. Maybe we should leave it that way."
What happened
The film won a Gold Lion at Cannes Lions in 2008, the first such achievement for Malaysia. It went on to win further international awards, including from Clio, One Show, and the Andy Awards.
Afterthought
If there had been a script, things probably wouldn't have turned out this way. It's a piece that captured something you're not supposed to be able to aim for, precisely by not aiming for it. The director, Yasmin Ahmad, passed away suddenly in 2009, but the work she left behind reportedly still stands as a benchmark for Malaysian advertising today. A round of applause for the crew who kept that camera rolling.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2008
