Yeo's 'Age of Goodbyes' Links Curse to 1969 Riots — SkimNews
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- Edmund Yeo's "The Age of Goodbyes" premiered in the Special Presentations section of the Toronto Film Festival, adapting Li Zi Shu's Malaysian Chinese novel about a family curse that swings five decades of Malaysian history.
- Yeo made a significant departure from the source novel by tying Lin Sang's disappearance directly to the May 13, 1969 racial violence in Kuala Lumpur, rather than to Du Li An's wedding day as in Li Zi Shu's book.
- Li Zi Shu's novel begins on page 513 as a deliberate nod to the May 13, 1969 race riots that left hundreds dead and hardened ethnic and political fault lines the article says still shape Malaysia today.
- Vivian Sung stars as Du Li An opposite Stanley Yau, who plays both the vanished Lin Sang and his double Mong Sang; Sung spent five to six months preparing, working with two language coaches on a 1960s Malaysian Chinese Cantonese and Hokkien accent and living a month in Kuala Lumpur.
- The film is a Taiwan-Malaysia co-production shot in Mandarin, Cantonese, Malay, Thai and English, and several songs on the soundtrack were written and performed by Yeo's own parents in the 1970s.
- Yeo is developing a century-spanning vampire story set between Borneo, Macau and Kaohsiung, plus a multigenerational drama connecting Malaysia and Japan through a family of filmmakers.
Why it matters: Yeo uses a family curse as narrative scaffolding for an unresolved episode in Malaysian history — the 1969 KL riots — whose aftermath the article notes continues to define the country's ethnic and political fault lines. For TIFF's Special Presentations slate, the multilingual Taiwan-Malaysia co-production signals a regional arthouse bet built on a novel once considered too structurally slippery for cinema.
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