SINGAPORE : 54 years ago, a tiny film studio was set up along East Coast Road to challenge the monopoly the existing studio Shaw Brothers had over Malay movies.

Even though the latter had as its star marquee idol P Ramlee, Cathay-Keris went on to carve its own niche, building stars out of names like Wahid Satay, Siput Sarawak and Maria Menado, while finding success with its Pontianak movies.

Now, a new generation of film lovers can be acquainted with these classics.

At a media briefing on 7th September, Cathay Organisation Holdings, which owns the rights to Cathay-Keris films, announced that it had donated 90 titles - in their original 16mm and 35mm formats - to the Singapore Asian Film Archives.

One particularly painful episode, said Cathay's president Suhaimi Rafdi, made the company realise the importance of archiving such a legacy.

"A number of classic Malay films have been lost since the studio closed in 1973," said Suhaimi, 40. "Some films, like the original Pontianak film from 1957, were thrown into a mining pool in Malaysia because one executive felt the reels took up too much storage space ... that act was certainly more gruesome that any horror movie we ever made."

By 2000, more than 230 classics, consisting of 90 Malay and 140 Chinese movies, had been digitally restored at a cost of US$2.5 million (S$3.8 million).

"We started digitising our films on digital beta format as early as 1995 so we could rescreen them," he added. "We did that also because we realised their condition had begun to deteriorate, so before it got any worse, we restored the old movies by re-enhancing the quality in the manner it was originally produced."

Among the films donated to the Singapore Asian Film Archives are classics like Sumpah Pontianak (1958), Sultan Mahmood Mangkat Di-Julang (1961), Dang Anom (1962) and Raja Bersiong (1963). These are currently being shown on StarHub's Malay cable channel Sensasi.

Thanks to renewed interest in these golden oldies, a retrospective film festival featuring the best of Cathay's Malay and Chinese movies in the new digital format is scheduled for November.

Dr Kenneth Paul Tan, the chairman of the Singapore Asian Film Archives, said Cathay's donation of these Malay films is a great effort towards preserving Singapore's film history.

Once these films are catalogued, there are plans to make the collection available for viewing at the library@esplanade, Singapore's first dedicated library for the performing arts.

This isn't the first time the company has donated its films. In 2004, Cathay had also donated 213 of its Chinese titles - produced during the 1950s and 1960s in Cathay's film studios in Hong Kong - to the Hong Kong Film Archive for preservation. - TODAY/ym