Banning of Zahari's 17 years

Zahari's 17 years is a 49-min film made by Martyn See (who was also the renowned filmmaker for Singapore Rebel) that is pretty much an interview with Said Zahari, who was detained without trial in February 1963 for suspicions of being a communist or a communist sympathiser. On 10 April 2007, this film met the same fate as his previous film, it got banned by Media Development Authority (MDA), for the reason that "the film gives a distorted and misleading portrayal of Said Zahari's arrest and detention under the Internal Security Act (ISA) in 1963 and is an attempt to exculpate himself from his past involvement with communist united front activities against the interests of Singapore".

"The Government will not allow people who had posed a security threat to the country in the past, to exploit the use of films to purvey a false and distorted portrayal of their past actions and detention by the Government. This could undermine public confidence in the Government."

Interestingly, this film was given a PG rating way back in early 2006.

But anyway, thanks to the efforts of MDA, this actually might help to publicise this film. People my generation who do not bother to study history when we are in school now have a chance to know this guy named Said Zahari, since the news got spread around the blogosphere. You know, people tends to be more interested in things after they got banned. If they weren't banned, probably we won't even know about their existence. This is what you call "free publicity".

Luckily, according to Fred, although the film is banned, it does not mean that you are banned from watching it. In the case of Zahari's 17 years, "the prohibition comes under the Films Act, which means possession and distribution of the film is an offence". So as long as 1) you do not store the film on your PC, on CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, DVD-RWs, portable hard drives, handphones, mp4 players, PS3, Xbox360, PDAs... you get the idea 2) you do not pass the film around to your family, friends, lover(s), colleagues, acquaintances, the MPs of your estate area, that girl you just know from the pub, the stray cat outside your home etc 3) you do not show it in front of an audience, you should be safe from the law. Verbally passing word around should be fine I suppose, although they might take it that you are trying to publicise it and decides to detain you for questioning. So yeah, don't be so stupid and talk loudly about it, okay?

So, it's still possible to watch on Google Video, Youtube and similar video sites. Go and watch it and see what's all the hype about and try to guess the reason(s) why they have decided to ban this film. Maybe it's too violent and gory? You never know. :P

EDIT: I have watched it, and it was truly an eye-opener. It does provide the other side to the story. I cannot say anymore about it otherwise there might be knocks on my door at 4am in the middle of the night. And no, I'm not talking about ghosts, you tut.