Disclaimer: In Real Life is a platform for everyday people to share their experiences and voices. All articles are personal stories and do not necessarily echo In Real Life’s sentiments.
Chan Teik Quan, born in 1996, is an Assistant Lecturer in the Faculty of Cinematic Arts at Multimedia University, Malaysia. In 2018 he made a film entitled ‘Weeping Birds’ about an elderly couple who take old age and death as a joke.
Later that same year, Chan’s mother passed away.
“The film was inspired by this one conversation my aunt and uncle had. We went out for a meal and I heard my aunt tell my uncle, “One of these days we have to go to the memorial centre to book a grave plot already,”.
I found it so funny as she said it with a straight face as if she was buying a house, it was so morbid. My aunt said, “It’s just dying, everybody has to go through it, everybody has to die one day.”.
My mother had a cancer scare a few years before she passed away. Doctors found some cancer cells but it wasn’t too serious. She had been quite careful with her health since then, she even tried going vegan, and at one point the cancer cells disappeared.
My intention to get my parents to act in the film was to immortalise them in a way.
Ever since the cancer scare, I had been quite cautious knowing my parents could just suddenly die. I took this film as an opportunity to put them on screen so that one day I can look back and say I used to have a mom, I used to have parents, they were real.
My dad was reluctant to act in it at first and my mom was the one who convinced him to do it.
She told my dad “Just do it for our son la, save more money. If we act then we don’t have to pay the actors.”.
We didn’t have much external funding for the project and most of it came from our own pockets as well as our parents.
Mom however performed quite a bit growing up and used to sing in school, she had sort of a performing bug in her and she saw this as a chance to shine.
The shoot was hectic. The crew and I had about 6 or 7 other projects running simultaneously so we were all super busy. Did I think it through? Putting my parents in this situation?
Honestly I didn’t. I was so busy that I didn’t have time to think about the pantang (superstition) of putting my parents in a film with a subject matter like this.
It came back to bite me though.
After making the film, my mom fell ill again. The cancer cells came back and travelled to her lungs.
To be honest my family isn’t super religious but we went to a chinese medium sort of as a last resort. My mom wasn’t getting better after everything else we had tried so we thought we’d just try it.
The medium told my family it was my fault.
“It’s because your son made this film. He made your mom lie in a coffin and didn’t burn the coffin afterwards which led to bad spirits following her and causing this illness.” He was blaming me for my immaturity and not being careful with superstitions like this.
I felt like maybe I did do something wrong but my family didn’t blame me at all. We are all very close and they knew it was bullsh*t. The medium was only able to say all this because my father had told him about the film beforehand.
We also knew it was bullsh*t because my dad, my cousin and I drove all the way back to the film set in Kluang and burned the coffin along with some talismans the medium gave us but it didn’t work. My mom still died.
I’ve only witnessed two deaths in my family, my grandma and my mom. I wasn’t super close with my grandma so it was sad, but I was still okay. When my mother passed away it was crazy. I didn’t think that I would ever get to a point in my life where I didn’t have a mom. I had always felt like my mom would stay alive with me forever, so when she passed away it was very weird.
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When it comes to death, the first thing that hits you isn’t really sadness. Of course you will cry, but there’s this whole other strangeness of someone leaving your life. You will never hear from them ever again. You need time to process that. My siblings and I went through that weirdness, it was a surreal feeling. Death became very real to us and it was like a wakeup call.
Our dad was the type of traditional Chinese man who doesn’t show emotion, but since our mom passed away, we would try to get closer to him. We would hug him, kiss him, and do all these affectionate things that we usually didn’t when we realised how fleeting a person’s life can be.
About 5 months after my mom’s death, I travelled to Venice with my film. There was this one beautiful sunny day where I felt genuine happiness.
I had met all these new friends and we were exploring Venice together, but suddenly sadness poked its ugly little head out and I thought about how the happiness would pass and that I would have to go home to my half an orphan life, not having a mom.
You get used to it though. I don’t even remember the last time I cried because of my mom.
When we were at the hospital after receiving the news of my mom’s death, the nurses who pushed her out were joking and gossiping and laughing even. I didn’t feel offended, but it was so weird to watch. They’re so used to people dying, my mom was nothing to them, just another number.
This little woman, her life is just that.
She grew up in a poor family and then she worked and worked and then she died. It’s magical though, seeing how much love we put into this one little woman. So much love that I can make films about her. That memory is super precious. I don’t think I will ever experience something like that again, having my family on set with me.”
Chan Teik Quan’s film ‘Weeping Birds’ has made rounds in the festival circuit at festivals such as the Singapore International Film Festival, Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival 9 in Italy, Minikino Film Week in Bali, Lobo Fest: Festival Internacional de Filmes in Brazil, and Cardiff International Film Festival to name a few. It will be available to stream online soon.
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