A Malaysia-Hong Kong Film Tackles the Complicated Issue of Baby Hatches

For the uninitiated, a pavane is the music for a slow, processional dance, now mostly associated with all things archaic – kind of like a cotillion. It’s a telling choice for Malaysian director Chong Keat Aun’s third feature film, Pavane For An Infant (搖籃凡世), but on reflection it’s not so disconnected. The film, after all, is about the slow processes that are chipping away at women’s agency and the archaic tone of the laws that govern them. The film comes on the heels of Snow in Midsummer, about the 13 May Incident in 1969, in which race riots broke out in Kuala Lumpur following an election that saw major gains by non-Malay candidates, and 2020’s The Story of Southern Islet, a more mystical but no less analytical tale of spiritualism and nationalism.

“Always,” replies Chong quickly, when asked if he’s once again tackling Malaysia’s national conscience. Pavane For An Infant pivots on two women entwined in the phenomenon of baby hatches as filtered through religious and political forces. (A baby hatch is a safe place where mothers can leave unwanted children.) The film had its origins in a series of interviews and baby hatch visits Chong did with an old university classmate — he was an Islamic Studies student at university — both before and after the Covid lockdowns.

“She’s the main person I wrote into the character in the film. I changed her a bit — my friend is Muslim — but like the character, she got pregnant, [the father] ran away and she sent the baby to the baby hatch,” says Chong. Looking relaxed in stylish, ultra-baggy trousers, a matching baseball cap and his signature thick framed glasses, he is lounging in a Mira hotel suite the day after the gala premiere of the film at the Hong Kong International Film Festival. “She told me after two or three months she regretted the decision and hoped to find her child. She never did.”

There’s much more to the film’s story, which unfolds in the post-pandemic era when baby hatch use has skyrocketed, largely due to domestic sexual assaults that result in unwanted pregnancies. It’s the kind of inward-looking social drama that Chong has become renowned for, as well as the kind of story Hong Kong filmmakers have embraced over the last few years. It comes as no surprise Pavane For An Infant is a Malaysia-Hong Kong co-production.

Chong describes The Story of Southern Islet as a “purely Malaysian” film, but he changed his approach for Snow in Midsummer, which was ultimately a Malaysian, Singaporean and Taiwanese co-production. With dialogue in Mandarin, Hokkien, Malay and Cantonese, Snow represents the best of what the rash of industry co-production treaties signed in the mid-2000s had aimed to do: foster an exchange of ideas and skills and pool resources across the region in order to make films that reflected the region, would demand audience attention and retain specific cultural identities. The European model that makes “Denmark/Germany/ France/Ireland/Greece” a regular part of that filmmaking landscape took a while to gain traction, but Chong is fully in support of regional cooperation. Pavane has dialogue in Malay, Cantonese, English, Mandarin and Minnan.

“Fear of losing one’s identity is not a fear I have,” says Chong. “Overall I think it’s a positive. Louis Koo opened two offices in Malaysia, one for equipment services and one focused on artists. My next film is with [mainland actor] Fan Bingbing and Natalie again. It’s getting harder and harder to make a film nowadays, and you can imagine how hard it was to find money for [this] film. So we are trying to connect with different regions and now it’s totally normal to have two, three, or four producers from different countries and regions. There are really no borders for making films. And I think it’s a great way for film production here to move forward.”

Pavane For An Infant begins with a wrenching couple of minutes, in which a frantic young woman pounds on the door and windows of the baby hatch centre she just left her newborn in. She’s changed her mind, but the 30 seconds she’s given to reverse that decision has elapsed and the door to the hatch is locked. Inside, social worker Lai Sum (Fish Liew) is working the night shift at the centre and tries to find a way to get around the rules; as someone who left a baby in a hatch years before she empathises. 

It’s near the end of Ramadan in Kuala Lumpur, and so non-Muslim Lai Sum works a few extra shifts to give her colleagues some time off. On another evening, as she’s defending the centre from online vitriol about “encouraging incest,” she sees Siew Man (Natalie Hsu) hanging around outside on the CCTV, clearly in distress. Lai Sum eventually discovers Siew Man is wrestling with an unwanted pregnancy the result of an assault and commits to helping the teenager arrive at a decision she can live with. The film is deeply symbolic as a way to address touchy themes, among them gender issues, the assignment of Islam as abandoned babies’ religion if unspecified, economic disparity and ideological discourse to get past censors.

“These are very complicated topics, and I can’t explain them more deeply, more overtly, because they’re so sensitive,” states Chong. And yet he does. Much of Pavane For An Infant quietly delves into why the hatches are necessary in the first place. As he did in his earlier films, Chong interrogates the place baby hatches hold as they relate to the tension between Malaysia’s multiple faiths and cultures, its conservative, patriarchal politics and the slow erosion of women’s autonomy over their bodies. At a time when the world seems to be following suit, the film is almost prescient in its themes.

“The story comes from Malaysia, but the message we wanted to bring forward about baby hatches isn’t just a Malaysian one,” he says. “Hong Kong doesn’t but Korea, Japan, mainland China, and Indonesia all have them, so it’s not just a Malaysian topic.” He notes that monasteries and churches are regular sites for so-called baby dumping in the West, and that baby hatches have been on the rise since 2000 in places as diverse as Pakistan, South Africa, Germany, and the United States. “Abandoned children are a worldwide subject.”

Visually, Pavane is Chong’s most accomplished film to date. Filmed almost entirely at night and in long shots and hard angles, a language he has honed since his first shorts, the images contribute to the story about the dark side of Malaysian society. That said, Chong includes plenty of bright spots, specifically in an appearance of traditionally matrilineal Minangkabau people — whose rights are being eroded too, according to Chong — during a trip Lai Sum and Siew Man take. They stop to watch a ceremony celebrating the birth of a girl, a sign of good fortune. The tribal dance plays a major part of the film’s closing frames, a high angle wide shot in which three women are seen taking very different paths. 

“I like odd angles and long shots because I like to put people within the environment,” says Chong. “I want to see the religion, the various temples, the traditions, the baby hatch within the larger context. And because I’m talking about women, the environment women live in and the faiths that can impact them, I want the big picture.” He points to several sequences where Malaysia’s tallest building is visible in the background and explains it’s viewed as a manly symbol at home. “This tallest building belongs to our ex-prime minister, Najib Razak, who right now is in jail for corruption,” he notes, pausing to add for ironic effect: “His wife is Minangkabau.”

Pavane For An Infant is demanding filmmaking, and on its surface may strike some as overly grim, particularly for its lack of any men with redeeming qualities. They’re embodied by Hong Kong actor Ben Yuen as temple shaman Keong and his assistant Ming (Teng Yuan), who ultimately play a key role in both women’s lives. It wasn’t on purpose, but Chong admits that in taking cues for the script from the women he spoke with for research — many victims of abuse and rape — he couldn’t be dishonest with their experiences. “One woman told me her life was completely changed and she’s not even interested in a relationship with a man any longer,” he says. “Luckily, she told me her story, so I just kind of followed her lead. This is a woman’s story and I have to put her reality in the story.” The film’s crucial closing frames are also silent, a stylistic choice that tacitly reminds us that women’s rights are just that: their rights.

“We decided we had to keep it silent, because there are so many voices and noises from the public demanding women do this or do that,” Chong finishes. “We couldn’t say anything. It’s their right to decide. We just watched.”

Pavane For An Infant premiered at the Hong Kong International Film Festival and is currently scheduled for 19 June 2025.