VENERABLE MALAYSIAN FILM critic Hamzah Hussin once crammed the historical origins of his country's native cinema into the following nutshell: "The Malaysian film industry was founded on Chinese money, Indian imagination, and Malay labor." That such a formula could be adapted to describe much of Malaysian cinema's subsequent history as well has a great deal to do with that country's deeply polyglot national, linguistic, and religious identity, in which native Malays lead an uneasy and sometimes volatile coexistence with the Chinese (speaking in various dialects) and Indian communities that constitute some 38 percent of the Southeast Asian nation's lively population mix. Serving the cinematic desires of such a cultural cauldron – not to mention Malaysia's hypersensitive censorship system – has long been a matter of balancing imported ingredients with local accommodations, and seasonal adjustments for what seems like each new dish.

The first Malaysian film, The Ill-Fated Lovers (1933), was based on a Sanskrit romance about doomed lovers that predates Romeo and Juliet by more than 100 years, and directed by Singapore Indian S.M. Chesty; imported Indian films, and Malaysian remakes of Indian films – with plots lifted whole-cloth and only cursorily accessorized with local slang – remained popular until recently. Shaw Brothers came to Malaysia (by way of Singapore) in the 1930s, competing against its longtime rivals Cathay Studios by lending its house brand of high production values to Malay-language variations on Chinese epics, with legendary Malaysian epic heroes like warlord Hang Tuah replacing Wong Fei-hong, and kung fu ferocity forcing aside the region's Islamic martial arts tradition known as silat. Though many early Malaysian films drew on local bumiputra folklore and plots from the opera theater known as bagsawan, Malay-language films dealing with the specificities of modern life have lead an entirely marginalized historical existence, with a surge of independent auteurs emerging in the late 1970s only to fade mostly into obscurity a decade later, as the country's entire film industry lapsed into decline. Despite the establishment of a government bureau to help fund local productions in the early '80s, Malaysian filmmaking had – until what seems like 10 minutes ago – apparently been swallowed by the sands of time.

That a new wave of Malaysian independent filmmakers should begin storming the barricades during the last three or four years now seems inevitable. After all, neighboring Thailand to the north was doing it, and Indonesia is coming up fast; even the still more censorious Singapore boasts a small but significant indie-film arm. Armed with ultralow budgets and the latest digital technologies, a determination to overcome – or burrow beneath – the various taboos and constraints on political and cultural expression that held their forerunners back, and a savvy about the ways international film festival exposure can be translated into change-making footholds back home, Malaysia's new generation is largely centered on a triumvirate of disparate but cross-pollinating filmmakers: prolific producer-director-cinematographer James Lee, sneak-attack sensualist Ho Yuhang, and Amir Muhammad, currently the most aesthetically adventurous and (when he wants to be) uncompromisingly funny Muslim filmmaker in the world. And yet, while this year's San Francisco International Film Festival's focus on Malaysia is certainly timely, the welcome presence of Muhammad's Tokyo Magic Hour and The Year of Living Vicariously scarcely makes up for the sense that, with neither of Lee's and Ho's award-winning recent films in the lineup, our local programming visionaries only managed to get the queerest part of the story straight.

Muhammad is sometimes referred to by his peers as the "godfather of new Malaysian filmmaking," and his smart, bitter, structurally audacious, sometimes sexy, and often laugh-out-loud-funny shorts now compiled as the feature-length 6horts (available on VCD through 6horts.tripod.com) demonstrate his aesthetic range and wry sense of outrage. Unfortunately, and despite their occasionally fascinating components, neither The Year of Living Vicariously, a doc about Indonesian political identity shot on the set of Jakarta-based indie director Riri Riza's historical biopic Gie and dense with split-screen dialectics, or Tokyo Magic Hour, an abstract and ultimately elusive love poem utilizing footage shot by other filmmakers, will give viewers much sense of the personal touch that makes 6horts so compelling, and Muhammad one of the best new filmmakers to emerge anywhere in recent years.

Princess of Mount Ledang is audacious in an altogether different way. The most expensive Malaysian film ever produced, former music-video director and New York University grad Saw Teong Hin's lavishly appointed and limitlessly tedious attempt to resurrect both the legendary Hang Tuah hits of the past and the pageantry of Shaw Brothers' high-gloss heyday doesn't just fly directly in the independence-determined face of what makes Malaysian cinema interesting today; even on its own terms – as a popcorn-peddling crowd-pleaser – it fails to even remotely entertain. Tsui Hark at least had the chutzpah to invest his Shaw Brothers remakes with breathless camera zest and fetishistically specific detail, rethinking, for example, One-Armed Swordsman by way of Ashes of Time when he conjured up The Blade. Saw seems content merely to dribble away 144 agonizing minutes of screen time with historical crash-test dummies droning on in platitudes about honor and sacrifice and assorted halfhearted attempts to revive the martial artistry of silat. Not that a fellow poseur like Zhang Yimou would feel threatened by Saw's stuck-in-its-sheath sense of cinematic swordplay, since even The Legend of Suriyothai seems altogether amphetamine-fueled next to this lumbering white-elephant parade.

A rare portrait of the hardscrabble lives of Malaysian Indian laborers working, as so many Indian immigrants in the 1960s did, on a rubber-tree estate in the remote countryside, director Deepak Kumaran Menon's The Gravel Road is an equally rare instance of Tamil-language Malaysian filmmaking. At once brooding and beautifully shot mainly in moonlit forest groves and lonely, muddy lanes, Menon's story (from a screenplay by his mother) about a teenage girl's determination to stay in school despite her family's desire that she uphold tradition and surrender to a life of menial day work takes equal inspiration from Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy and Malcolm X's assertion that a race, like an individual, can only find fulfillment through confidence, talent, and an unwavering belief in itself. Woo Ming Jin's Monday Morning Glory – photographed by James Lee, who brings his fondness for the long-take patience and compositional minimalism of Tsai's films along with him – takes a rather less certain position on the question of racial and moral self-confidence. "A film based on 1,001 bombings," Woo's movie observes the daily lives of Islamic terrorists in the aftermath of the Bali-like bombing of a discotheque, but far from the Koran-quoting, jihad-crazed marionettes of Team America: World Police and the Fox News network, these killers are neither raving ideologues or remorseless monsters; they're victims of the same sorts of social circumstance, romantic insecurities, and subsistence wages as those whose lives they force themselves to take. A bit long and sometimes labored in its point-making, Monday Morning Glory nevertheless displays a willingness to engage the banalities of terrorist evil unseen since the heyday of the New German Cinema, lo those many decades ago.

The problems of culture-crossing Malaysian romance that Muhammad's "Pangyau" managed so lucidly to detail in only a quarter of an hour return, with gender issues domesticated for mainstream success, in the winningly acted and sometimes quite delightful two hours of Yasmin Ahmad's Sepet. The story of a Malay girl whose crush on Japanese actor Takeshi Kaneshiro leads to a (probably doomed) affair with a Chinese VCD vendor, Sepet – a regional racist slur meaning "slant eyes" – is often genuinely moving and amusing, if marred by an indecisive ending and ultimately based on notions no more novel than those found in The Ill-Fated Lovers back in 1933. And for a film yearning for freshness, from cinema historically plagued by pervasive attachments to retrofitted film forms, it's also an unfortunate reminder of what film critic Baharudin A. Latif wrote of Malaysian cinema, back in the late 1990s, just before this newest filmmaking generation got its wings: "Even today, long after the Indians have left the scene and so-called new blood has crowded into the industry, variations are still being played out, mostly subconsciously, by directors who have failed to properly understand their heritage and who, excepting a handful of really talented directors, actually have nothing new to contribute to their craft."

Chuck Stephens

'The Gravel Road' (2004) plays Fri/22, 4:30 p.m., PFA; May 1, 1:15 p.m., Kabuki; May 4, 9:45 p.m., Kabuki.

'Monday Morning Glory' (2005) plays Sun/24, 2 p.m., PFA; May 1, 9:15 p.m., Kabuki; May 5, 3:45 p.m., Kabuki.

'Princess of Mount Ledang' (2004) plays April 28, 8 p.m., Kabuki; May 4, 1:30 p.m., Kabuki.

'Sepet' (2004) plays April 30, 6 p.m., Kabuki; May 4, 10 a.m., Kabuki; May 5, 5 p.m., Kabuki.

'Split Screen: Two Films by Amir Muhammad'(2004-2005) plays April 29, 8:45 p.m., Kabuki; May 3, 3:15 p.m., Kabuki.