Grandchild of Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad offers intimate look at iron-fisted prime minister in new documentary
- M for Malaysia is a candid documentary on Mahathir’s campaign and re-election as Malaysian prime minister last year
- It was directed by Mahathir’s granddaughter, Ineza Roussille, who talks about growing up with her famous granddad
Filmmaker Ineza Roussille clearly recalls the moment in 1998 when she heard that her grandfather had sacked Malaysia’s deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim.
Anwar’s daughter was in tears at their Kuala Lumpur school and being comforted by a group of friends. When Roussille, then 11, asked what had happened, they tutted and wagged their fingers as if she was the cause of her classmate’s distress.
That was the start of an excruciating time for the eldest grandchild of Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad.
When Anwar was jailed for abuse of power and sodomy in 1999, charges widely believed to have been engineered by Mahathir to remove his protégé-turned-rival, the school split into the “Anwar camp” and the “Mahathir camp”. Some pro-Anwar teachers simply stopped talking to Roussille altogether.
“I didn’t go through anything like what Anwar’s kids suffered, but when 1998 happened, it was a weirdly messy time. People at school would say horrible things to me every day,” the now 32-year-old says.
The daughter of Marina Mahathir and her first husband, Frenchman Didier Roussille, escaped the toxic environment a year later when she moved to a boarding school in Australia. But politics continued to be a major influence on her even before Mahathir – Malaysia’s iron-fisted prime minister from 1981 to 2003 – was voted into office again at the ripe old age of 92 last year.