LGM Film Club, Part 262: Malaysia, 1970

I’m always sort of fascinated with what are now older western films about the developing world, largely because they are almost always incredibly shallow discussions of them. In this case, an overall of the Malaysian economy from about 1970, it’s super shallow this way, though the footage is interesting enough I suppose. When I wrote the palm oil post earlier today, I thought I should find some old film about Malaysia and it did what I wanted, which was to remind me of how fast that nation has changed due to palm oil, the clearing of the jungle, and the degradation of the environment that has caused while providing almost no employment to the people since it doesn’t take many people to harvest palm oil. You can see that a half-century ago, this was a very, very different nation.