River of Exploding Durians (2014) - Edmund Yeo

Messy and contemplative, much like any meaningful act of societal-based introspection, Edmund Yeo's River of Exploding Durians employs the malleable nature of late adolescent psyches to examine the milieu of the native Malaysian community, one which feels stuck in a perpetual state of stasis despite the abundance of transnationalism all around them.  Yeo's formalist designs and stylistic sensibilities encapsulate this sense of stagnation through use of static composition and minimal camera movements, evoking the loss of identity and cultural diaspora felt by a small rural community in the era in which the monolith of transnational exchange moves forward unimpeded, encroaching on their way of life through crude notions of progress tied to industrialization.  Resting at the fulcrum between historical native text and modernity's assurances related to material progress, River of Exploding Durians details the discovery of injustice and uncertainty purveyed through the impressionable eyes of youth. The historical record often obfuscates facile notions of progress brought by modernity, and the central characters of this story find themselves awakened through education yet struggling with their identity due to the cultural homogeneity brought by transnationalism.  Melancholic and contemplative yet tinged with polemic outbursts - mainly driven by the spiraling and increasingly unhinged psyche of a history teacher whose been in this fight for far longer - River of Exploding Durians is messy narratively but piercing in the atmosphere and mood it evokes. The lower classes of society -disjointed and displaced by the cultural and economic homogeneity forces of neoliberalism - are static or despondent, their own polity offering no reprieve, as it too has been  firmly assimilated into modernity's crude notions of progress in which often the lower-class and under-privileged are pushed to the periphery for the gains of the ruling class and those privileged to be a part of it.