Good morning.
Picture a sun-kissed island off Singapore, where hardcore gangsters roam freely amid the hard labour of building, by hand, their new open-air prison.
This idyllic experiment in rehabilitation in 1960 became hailed around the world as a beacon for enlightened prison reform. But within three years, it all went up in blood and flames.
CNA executive editor Shamala Rajendran knew this tale to be true: “My granduncle was a gangster in the 1960s, and he’d told his sister, my grandmother, that the prisoners were going to riot in a few days.”
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The penal settlement was burnt to the ground, some guards brutally murdered – including the superintendent, Daniel Dutton, who’d believed redemption for gangsters was possible.
In Singapore’s trial of the century, 59 men stood accused of rioting and murder. Talk of brutality experienced on Pulau Senang emerged; was this penal paradise all it seemed?
To make the two-part documentary Riot Island, producers drew from restricted-access archives and tracked down people whose stories had never been told before. Like Michael Dutton, who flew to Singapore and visited his half-brother’s grave for the very first time.
Meanwhile, a different kind of story about dangerous convention-breaking is unfolding in Indonesia – where a few rare women are making their living as daredevil motorcycle stunt riders.
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The stunts are performed in a two-storey cylindrical barrel called the Tong Setan or ‘Devil’s Barrel’. And his year’s monsoon rains have made its walls even more slippery and extremely dangerous, reveals producer-director Yerinne Park.
Mother-of-two Devi, who hails from the staunchly Muslim province of Aceh, also must deal with traditional expectations that she stay home to be a “good housewife” because (as her uncle puts it) if women work too much, it will threaten the men.
Breaking with convention is always a bold gamble – and as these two gripping new documentaries show, the stakes can sometimes be life-and-death.
Shamala Rajendran, executive editor & Ngoi Soon Ling, senior editor
CNA Content Commissioning
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