Sometimes, the audience response to a film can be more important than the actual film itself. Don’t quite get it? Let me explain what I mean.

The recent success of the Malaysian film, The Journey, in the box office caught everybody by surprise, including the makers and distributors of the film themselves.

To date, the film has collected RM13.5 million, becoming the highest ever grossing Malaysian film in history. And already 5 weeks in the theatres, it’s still going on.

Why is this such a surprise? Well, The Journey is a Chinese-language film targeted for the Chinese-speaking audience in the country.

With a record-breaking collection of RM13.5 million at the box office, this translates into a total of 1.1 million people actually buying tickets to watch the film.

Everyone knows that to make it that big in the Malaysian cinema industry, one needs to target the Malay-speaking crowd because they are the ones with the numbers.

And that’s why all the previous record holders of the coveted highest-grossing film in Malaysia have been Malay-language films.

This kind of audience response is nothing but positive and it can only be seen as a sign that the Malaysian cinema audience is now maturing.

The audience has spoken and they can now appreciate a good story, no matter what language the film is in and whatever target audience the filmmakers were looking at.

Without taking anything away from the film, The Journey is decently made, with beautiful cinematography (sometimes a little too annoyingly beautiful!) and good direction.

A pretty basic plot of girl meets boy, girl is from a traditional Chinese family while boy is from a liberal western country, conflict ensues and acceptance and love prevails.

But what made the story that appealing to so many Malaysians is the fact that everyone watching it could feel the Malaysian-ness oozing from the screen.

From the charmingly colloquial Chinese dialects and smattering of Malay, right to the unabashed look at the beauty and, most importantly, the foibles of Malaysian-Chinese society.

“As far as the entire production team is concerned, we just wanted to tell a really good story. It just so happened that this one is in Chinese. It’s wonderful that it has been accepted by all layers of society,” summed up director, Chiu Keng Guan, aptly.

Today, when tensions related to national unity and religious harmony seem to dominate daily life, a simple story can really show that at the bottom of it all, we all realise that we are just Malaysians.