Remembering the Golden Age of Malay Cinema: P. Ramlee

In 1948, a young keroncong musician from Penang embarked on a journey to Singapore. He hoped to seize an opportunity to work with Shaw’s Malay Film Productions, a studio at Jalan Ampas, Balestier, which made Malay-language films for local audiences.

This musician—Teuku Zakaria bin Teuku Nyak Puteh, better known by his stage name, P. Ramlee—swiftly rose through the studio’s ranks as a singer, actor, composer, writer, and director. By the 1950s, he had become a household name in Singapore and the rest of Southeast Asia.

For many, P. Ramlee is closely intertwined with Singapore’s “Golden Age of Malay Cinema”, a 25-year period from the late 1940s to the early 1970s during which more than 250 Malay-language films were produced in Singapore by Malay Film Productions and Cathay-Keris. During this period, P. Ramlee directed 17 films in Singapore, and acted in many more.

Remembering the Golden Age of Malay Cinema: P. Ramlee is an initiative by the National Archives of Singapore that celebrates P. Ramlee’s profound impact on Singapore’s artists, audiences, and film industry, past and present. The initiative comprises a curated page of archived audiovisual records documenting P. Ramlee’s life and work, as well as a crowdsourcing call for records documenting the Golden Age of Malay Cinema.

Click the panels below to access the curated page and crowdsourcing call.