While watching Seng Tat's Flower In The Pocket at its press screening on Wednesday, what stood out to me were two censored scenes in the film.
The first one was when one of the boys, Li Ohm, was taking a crap outdoors, and asked his older brother Li Ah to 'get some papers' from his school bag so that he could wipe his butt. Li Ah couldn't find any, so Li Ohm said:
The audio was silenced, and the subtitled was blurred out, but everyone knew he was wiping his butt with a Malay textbook.
Obviously it's WRONG to show a kid wiping his butt with the Malay textbook onscreen, but I wonder whether the censors would say anything if he were wiping his butt with, say, a Chinese or English textbook. Hm.
Another scene that caught my attention was when a little puppy the kids were playing with suddenly got PIXELATED! I was wondering what the hell happened. Many audiences probably wondered the same too. Someone voiced that out during the Q & A session after the film, and Seng Tat explained that it all happened because there were background sounds of the Azan (Muslim prayers).
No dogs or puppies can be seen during the sounds of Azan! The Censorship Board asked Seng Tat to remove the background sound, but due to the fact that there was dialogue during the scene between the two protagonists, hard to do it. So he 'censored' the puppy instead!!
If there's a moral to this post, it would have to be, don't shoot a film with a puppy when there's Azan in the background!
The first one was when one of the boys, Li Ohm, was taking a crap outdoors, and asked his older brother Li Ah to 'get some papers' from his school bag so that he could wipe his butt. Li Ah couldn't find any, so Li Ohm said:
Just get me the Bahasa (BLEEP) textbook!
The audio was silenced, and the subtitled was blurred out, but everyone knew he was wiping his butt with a Malay textbook.
Obviously it's WRONG to show a kid wiping his butt with the Malay textbook onscreen, but I wonder whether the censors would say anything if he were wiping his butt with, say, a Chinese or English textbook. Hm.
Another scene that caught my attention was when a little puppy the kids were playing with suddenly got PIXELATED! I was wondering what the hell happened. Many audiences probably wondered the same too. Someone voiced that out during the Q & A session after the film, and Seng Tat explained that it all happened because there were background sounds of the Azan (Muslim prayers).
No dogs or puppies can be seen during the sounds of Azan! The Censorship Board asked Seng Tat to remove the background sound, but due to the fact that there was dialogue during the scene between the two protagonists, hard to do it. So he 'censored' the puppy instead!!
If there's a moral to this post, it would have to be, don't shoot a film with a puppy when there's Azan in the background!
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