The home has changed. The palm oil trees have grown in endless symmetry. The landscape rusts and the nostalgia turns. KARAOKE is a homecoming story. BETIK returns to his village to help his mother with the karaoke a few years after the death of his father. During the day, he has also taken a job with his uncle making karaoke videos. KARAOKE is a story that takes you back home yet reminds you to go back where you came from. KARAOKE is a debut feature film about home and deception in a karaoke club within a palm oil plantation in Malaysia. The narrative is shaped around a Malaysian term for homecoming, ‘balik kampung’, which is a romantic and nostalgic ideal of comfort in unconditional family love. Within this conventional storyline, the subtitles of the karaoke songs become another narrative that is weaved throughout in order to guide an alternative sentiment to an already sentimental ideal.
