Petronas' 'Tan Hong Ming': an unscripted crush wins Malaysia's first Cannes Gold

Malaysia's 50th Independence Day in 2007 was the occasion, and Petronas, the national oil company, was expected to produce its signature Merdeka commercial. The brief carried real weight: the country's communities were divided along ethnic lines, and the ad had to speak to all Malaysians at once.

Leo Burnett Malaysia's executive creative director Yasmin Ahmad took an unusual route. She went to a primary school in Taman Tun Dr Ismail and interviewed children about friendship, planning to find a story among their answers. After the formal interviews, seven-year-old Tan Hong Ming kept seeking the crew's attention, so she sat him down for an impromptu chat — and he confessed, on camera, that he loved his classmate Ummi Khazriena, a girl of a different race. The crew scrambled to find her, and the resulting film was kept almost entirely unscripted.

The only piece of direction in the whole spot was asking Hong Ming to walk Ummi back to class; that natural walk away, hand in hand, became the film's iconic final image. The closing line — 'Our children are colour-blind. Shouldn't we keep them that way?' — turned a six-year-old's crush into a statement about the nation.

The commercial won the Gold Spike in TV at Spikes Asia 2008 and, per The Edge Malaysia, a Gold Lion at Cannes 2008 — the first for a Malaysian film — and the Gunn Report 2008 called it one of the most charming declarations of love beyond racial discrimination. The children became national celebrities, and the ad is still remembered as the moment Petronas became the custodian of national unity.