Pocket money, rainy shoots, 7 awards: how ‘Kola Loompor’ came together

Some contributed RM100, others RM300. Director Wan Nur Azwin Wan Nazrul Aisham put in RM1,000 of her own money, while another member of the team chipped in as much as RM1,200.

For a group of university students trying to make a short film, those were significant sums. But pooling their pocket money helped bring “Kola Loompor” to life – and the gamble has now paid off handsomely.

The 18-minute production by Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) students picked up seven awards at the 14th Malaysian Student Film and Video Festival, including the top “Best of the Best” honour.

It also won Best Screenplay, Best Promising Director, Best Promising Actress, Best Cinematography, Best Editing and Best Production Design, while the team received a RM50,000 short-film production grant for its next project.

For Wan Nur Azwin, 24, better known as Aween Aisham, the scale of the success came as a surprise. The film had entered the festival with nine nominations, but she said the team’s main hope had simply been to make their university proud.

The filmmaking itself was considerably less glamorous. Working with a limited budget, the UiTM Puncak Perdana students had no professional actors and shot the entire production outdoors around Kuala Lumpur.

Persistent rain forced them to rethink and rearrange scenes as filming progressed. But those limitations also helped give “Kola Loompor” much of its character.

The team cast a Bangladeshi supermarket worker in the leading role, reflecting a story inspired by the realities faced by migrant workers living in the capital.

The film follows Naeem, a Bangladeshi migrant worker who forms an unlikely friendship with Zainab, a local homeless woman. Their relationship eventually takes a painful turn when she disappears with his money.

Rather than presenting Kuala Lumpur through its familiar landmarks and polished cityscape, the story turns its attention towards people whose lives can easily go unnoticed within it.

For Aween, the RM50,000 production grant now offers the team something they did not have while making “Kola Loompor” – room to think beyond what they could personally afford.

She described the money spent on the film as substantial for students and said the grant had given the group fresh motivation to make their next project even stronger.

Finas chief executive officer Azmir Saifuddin Mutalib, meanwhile, said student filmmakers should use short films to build portfolios and gain exposure at festivals before moving into commercial filmmaking.

Universities, he added, are producing promising final-year projects that could potentially travel further with greater industry collaboration and support.

For the young team behind “Kola Loompor”, though, the immediate lesson may be a simpler one: a film does not necessarily need a large budget or established stars to make an impression.

Sometimes it begins with a handful of students, unpredictable weather, and whatever they can afford to pull from their own pockets.

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