Dain Said interview
Dain Said is not telling us his age. ‘You’re judged by your age,’ he says with a faint British accent. Age is often seen as something to be feared, to be patronised, as if we’d be penalised for not looking and ageing a certain way. Dain, like Madonna, is telling us that we can’t live outside time, but we can still tell a story – build a legacy, even – that could outlast ourselves. Dain spent most of his formative years in the attic of his London home, where his family had relocated to from their kampung in Tumpat, Kelantan. He left school at 15, but was constantly devouring books and poetry, which spoke to him a private language of love and nuance, whose fictional worlds enlarged him as a person. ‘“Iskandar”, my friends used to call me that in the UK. “The headmaster is asking for you”. I had a very checkered educational background.’ Thomas Hardy, Susan Sontag and Joseph Conrad may have a place in Dain’s personal literary pantheon, but it is film that truly fascinates him. The filmmaker graduated from London’s University of Westminster in Film and Photography in 1990, before directing short films, TV shows, advertisements and two feature films locally: the unreleased ‘Dukun’ in 2007, and the awardwinning ‘Bunohan’ in 2012. ‘Bunohan’, a product of Dain’s unifying aesthetic and dramatic sensibilities, earned its rightful place as Malaysia’s entry for the Oscars’ Best Foreign Language Film category. It’s a tour de force of cinematic energy, where action clashes as mightily as