Introducing the MESYM Crossover Documentary Series

The goal of MESYM is to support people and organizations to work together, to push for the betterment of the environment. For this, we have been organizing MESYM Documentary Nights to create environmental awareness. We watch a documentary featuring an issue, discuss why it happens, how to solve it, and what we can all do about it.

The monthly MESYM Documentary Nights have been held for more than half a year, and we have received good feedback from the community. At this point, we think that it is time to reach out to other realms.

Environmental issues are generally not highly prioritized by Malaysians in general. However, what is not perceived is that many of the issues that we are concerned about (economics, politics, capitalism, democracy, mass media… to name a few) are actually linked to environmental issues, whether directly or indirectly.

Also, environmental issues that we encounter are also very much impacted by these matters. In many cases, the environmental problems are a consequence of bad political decisions, biased media representation, rampant capitalism and so on. Only through exploring these other topics can we penetrate deeper into the crux of the matter.

Here are some examples of the connections between environmental issues and broader topics:

  • Lynas (Politics / Economics)
  • Tasik Chini (Economics / Civil rights)
  • Climate change (Capitalism / Mass media)
  • Mass deforestation (Economics / Democracy)

This is why we decided to hold a second documentary night, creating “crossovers”, of environmental issues and one other issue that will be the focus of the documentary. With the new MESYM Crossover Documentary Series, we choose and explore a topic, and from there discuss its linkages with the environment.

With this new series, we hope to achieve the following:

  • To inspire a multi-faceted view on environmental issues, embedded in a wider context
  • To mingle and connect with other circles or communities in Malaysia (economic, political, civil rights, etc), to work together with them, so that we can create a bigger movement towards attaining a common goal.

The MESYM Crossover Documentary Series will be held on the last Sunday of each month at Merdekarya. Everyone is welcome to join us, admission is free, just buy a drink! For our first event, the crossover topic is The Arts. We will screen Waste Land, a social documentary based around the lives of garbage pickers in Rio de Janeiro.

We hope to see you there, and bring your friends!

p/s. To be clear, we’re still holding our MESYM Documentary Nights on the 2nd Tuesday of every month – now we have two documentaries per month 🙂

Welcome to MESYM!
Connecting the green dots

MESYM.com is a crowd-sourced platform and a living database for environmental movements in Malaysia. There are many good actions being done out there. Our goal is to bring them together. We connect the green dots.