‘Inbetweenness’, Tanah Air and Nusantara in Dain Said’s Bunohan (2012), Interchange (2016) and Dukun (2018)

ABSTRACT This article examines three films by Malaysian Dain Said; Bunohan: return to murder (2012), Interchange (2016) and Dukun (2018). Particular attention is paid to the use of land and water (tanah air) imagery, cinematic qualities, and the richness of the cultural practices of Nusantara from which the films arise. Dain’s films explore arguments around national identity in the areas of the dramatic and the semantic. Additionally, the cinematic style of these films denotes a struggle between transnational identities and the logics of rigid national cultural boundaries. I argue that the films bring to fore a way of thinking that sees the people of Nusantara living in the interspace and moving smoothly across the archipelago. By perceiving films as ‘a liminal site of modern society’ and reflecting on ‘inbetweenness’ as the premise for everything that drives the narratives of Bunohan, Interchange, and Dukun, I maintain that the three films represent a Malaysian interstitial future that emerges between the claims of the past and the demands of the present. These films challenge and explicitly expose the conservative notion of a Malaysian monoculture, and they highlight the complexities of associative relationships through the subjects’ fractured sense of belonging. Dain creates images of Nusantara life, characterised by elements of mise en scène with which regional populations can relate. These transnational non-state-centred representations show that the land and the water have defined societies living in the in-between region of Nusantara, and focus on features that reveal the connection between peoples rather than the cultural biases and discrimination that are so often part of national discourses in the region.