Dreams of Cloth & Colour

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Dreams of Cloth and Colour came from the unlikely collaboration between FilmCo, a craft entrepreneur, an isolated upriver longhouse community and the state’s power company. Our immediate client runs Tanoti House, a social enterprise specialising in Kain Songket. She had her own dream: a series of videos to document the intricate, painstaking processes behind Sarawak’s most celebrated handicrafts, both for preservation and education and also for inspiration. FilmCo had worked with this client many times before, artistic and creative projects that stretched our imaginative capabilities. This new project demanded both art and industry – an instructional video to document the step-by-step process of dyeing and weaving the pua kumbu and also a short film to appeal to the senses and create a love of this ceremonial cloth.

The community in question already had established links with our craft entrepreneur. Rumah Gare is far up the Sungei Kain, cut off from real road links. A longhouse to an Iban indigenous community, it is also the home of one of Sarawak’s last dream weavers and master dyers. Our challenge was to get the crew and all our equipment up from Kuching to Kapit, an eight-hour road trip and four-hour boat ride away, and then beyond into their ancestral lands. We would be there over two weeks to film the traditional Ngar ritual, in which the threads are mordanted before being ikat-woven into pua kumbu. As with the weaving, the filming would require intricate planning, as well as time and resources for our five-person team.

This is where the state’s power company, Sarawak Energy Bhd, stepped in. This organisation already has a developed CSR programme aimed at preserving indigenous culture and heritage as part of its renewable energy agenda. Our craft entrepreneur client made the contact and turned producer in the process. Sarawak Energy agreed to fund both the film and requirements for the ritual, both supporting the community in their weaving and ensuring this important record of a declining practice.

Filmed over two weeks of sleepless nights and hectic days, punctuated by the occasional long soak in the Sungei Kain, the ritual unfolded on film. The result is Dreams of Cloth and Colour, a record of and a homage to a rarely seen ritual and a remarkable series of relationships. We hope it will be the first of many.