KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 22 — Award-winning Malaysian film Abang Adik — which tells the tale of brotherly love between two stateless men living in Pudu in the heart of Kuala Lumpur — has 10 hidden symbols, according to its director Jin Ong.

There could be spoilers from this point onwards, so skip this until you have watched the movie that is still showing in local cineplexes.

Ong said one of the symbols is a blue-coloured shirt.

"Actually I put 10 hidden messages inside, like the blue shirt because our IC is blue colour, and the Abang knows that he’ll never have the blue, so he gave the blue to Adik,” he said during a brief question-and-answer with the audience after a screening of the film at the Golden Screen Cinemas at The Starling Mall in Petaling Jaya, Selangor.

Another symbol is a dish of chicken feet being devoured at a kopitiam in which Adik catches the news on TV regarding Abang in relation to a crime that had happened.

To Ong, it represented how humans are being eaten whole by the world.

"Because eating chicken feet to me is like this world, they are eating people without even taking out any even the bones; they are just eating like that. So this is one of the hidden messages I want to bring out.

"Like others, like the small, small animals, chicken is like destined, waiting to get slaughtered,” said Ong, who also wrote the script for the film.

The Malaysian filmmaker was explaining his take on symbolisms in the movie in response to a member of the audience who wanted to know if certain names and the juxtapositions of certain scenes, like the low-cost flats against the skyscrapers in KL, were deliberate.

The film has a number of close-up shots and lingering scenes that could be triggering for some viewers.

Apart from the close-up of live chickens being butchered at a Pudu market, there are also times when the camera zooms in on tiny creatures, such as ants crawling over a cooked rice meal, and small ornamental fish kept inside plastic bags.

A diaphanous scarf is another symbol with a hidden meaning.

"So these are all the symbolic things that I put in the movie. So the scarf is to me is like a memory that is fading away,” Ong said.

Others are free to interpret the scarf differently though.

Ong also listed three other symbols, but did not elaborate on their meaning.

One is an officer named ‘Adil’, a bus with the words ‘Bahagia Ekspres’ painted on its side, and a billboard proclaiming ‘Kita Anak Malaysia’.

Abang Adik stars Taiwanese actor Wu Kang Ren as the deaf and mute elder brother and Malaysian actor Jack Tan as the younger brother, with the former winning the Best Actor award at the prestigious 60th Golden Horse Awards.

The movie, which features Cantonese, Mandarin, Malay, English and sign language, shows the hardships faced by undocumented people living in Kuala Lumpur.