Urban geography as pretext: Sociocultural landscapes of Kuala Lumpur in independent Malaysian films Khoo Gaik Cheng School of Humanities, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia Correspondence: Khoo Gaik Cheng (email: gaikcheng.khoo@anu.edu.au) Current independent filmmaking in Malaysia has the potential to be an alternative and viable space for creative and political expression, relative to mainstream national cinema (Malay cinema) and to the state. I focus on alternative imagery and sociocultural mappings of Kuala Lumpur in three ‘indie’ films. All three films contain documentary elements capturing social geographies of the city not represented in mainstream Malay cinema, or even if represented not subjected to a critical gaze by the filmmaker. The Big Durian centres on the perspectives of the city’s urban middle class of all ethnicities; Bukak Api portrays the daily struggles of Malay transsexual sex workers in Chow Kit, a predominantly working-class Chinese neighbourhood and red light district; and 18? highlights the opinions of the nongovernmental organization community, bohemians, artists, anarchists and media activists mostly in the cosmopolitan suburb of Bangsar. These representations of the Malay- sian urban landscape are pretexts for and politicize the national landscape through a discussion of ethnicity and race politics, sexuality, and the lack of space for freedom of creative expression and critical thinking. Keywords: independent/indie filmmaking, cosmopolitanism, The Big Durian, Bukak Api, 18?, Malaysia Film can open a window on the sphere of human relations, depicting how people move through space, how they interact with objects in the landscape, how they interact with space designed by urban planners, how they interact with each other in this space. Films also can interpret the struggles of everyday life, often overlooked, as profoundly significant (Lisa Benton, 1995: 160). Introduction In this paper, I would like to do two things: emphasize the site of film practice as a spatial issue (Hay, 1997: 212) before focusing on the representations of Kuala Lumpur, Malay- sia’s capital city, in three focal films. The vibrant independent or ‘indie’ filmmaking arena in Malaysia over the last six years has shown itself to be an alternative and viable space for creative and political expression, relative to mainstream national cinema (Malay cinema) and to the state. The commercial film industry and all it entails – production studios, post-production facilities, equipment rentals, FINAS (National Film Development Corporation) – has been located in Kuala Lumpur since the 1960s, shifting up from Singapore in the wake of independence. Indie filmmakers are also based here. More fondly referred to as ‘KL’, the capital city and its sprawl, the Greater Klang Valley, is a synecdoche of the nation, its central and leading position in Malaysian culture and politics assured through the concentration of wealth, urban development, cultural and political activity and continuous in-migration of jobseekers. Hence, most film stories are set in and around KL and revolve around urban issues the characters face. However, I believe that there are general differences in the way indie filmmakers portray KL and, concurrently, the values of the Malay ethnic majority that are often represented in the doi:10.1111/j.1467-9493.2008.00318.x Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 29 (2008) 34–54 © 2008 The Author Journal compilation © 2008 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd