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Petronas Stay Turns a 1980s Sacrifice Into Chinese New Year Cinema
Petronas Stay is a 2025 Chinese Lunar New Year film produced for the Malaysian market by Petroliam Nasional Berhad, directed by Caleb Huang, that tells the story of Xiao Bao, a young boy whose mother leaves him in the care of financially stable relatives after the festive season as an act of selfless sacrifice.
The film launched on 22 January 2025 across PETRONAS's official YouTube and Facebook pages, according to petronas.com. Set against the rural landscape of Kuala Selangor, Stay reconstructs a practice that was quietly common across Malaysia during the 1980s, when economic hardship led families to place children with relatives who could offer greater stability. The narrative follows Xiao Bao from the confusion of childhood separation through to an adult understanding of what his mother's decision truly meant. In doing so, the film operates simultaneously as a cultural document and a corporate values statement rooted in empathy, compassion, and mutual care.
PETRONAS Senior General Manager of Strategic Communications Siti Azlina Abdul Latif described the film as a reflection of values deeply embedded in Malaysia's cultural fabric, stating that Stay was designed to inspire Malaysians to continue fostering unity and support for one another. The campaign sits within PETRONAS's long-running tradition of emotionally anchored festive storytelling, a tradition the company has maintained across Hari Raya, Merdeka, and Chinese New Year occasions for over two decades. The 2025 edition carries a Clapboard Score of 74 out of 100, reflecting strong craft and cultural resonance alongside scope for broader strategic amplification. The agency behind the campaign is Accenture Song, operating through Accenture Solutions Sdn Bhd, as documented by kancilawards.com.
PETRONAS approaches Chinese New Year not as a promotional window but as an occasion for national storytelling. Stay extends this philosophy by choosing a historical social truth, the informal fostering of children among extended families during economic hardship in 1980s Malaysia, as the emotional engine of the film. This is not invented sentiment. It is a lived experience that resonates across generations of Malaysian Chinese families, giving the campaign an authenticity that purely aspirational advertising cannot manufacture.
The strategic context is significant. In Malaysia, Chinese New Year commands intense competition among major brands for emotional share of voice. Competitors including Digi and Maxis have historically invested in festive films targeting similar audiences, according to reporting by Marketing Interactive. PETRONAS differentiates by operating at a longer narrative timescale, building films that function as short cinema rather than extended commercials. The 2022 predecessor campaign, Live Again, introduced the seven-episode drama series 366, as documented by marketing-interactive.com, establishing a precedent for serialised festive storytelling that Stay builds upon with a single, more concentrated narrative arc.
The campaign's thematic platform, Beyond Close Doors, was designed to explore the relationships and sacrifices that unfold within and around the family unit during the festive season, according to Thestar Com My. This framing allows PETRONAS to move beyond celebration into territory that is genuinely complex: the love expressed through departure rather than presence. In Malaysia, where intergenerational family obligation and sacrifice carry deep cultural weight, this is a strategically precise choice. The creative team, led by Executive Creative Director Zaheer Kaisar and Creative Director Cherry Lee as listed by kancilawards.com, built the script around restraint, allowing Xiao Bao's incomprehension to carry the emotional argument without melodrama.
Caleb Huang directed Stay, bringing to the project a sensibility attuned to quiet, observational storytelling. The film was produced by Passion Plus, with Adrian Lai serving as executive producer, as confirmed by thestar.com.my and petronas.com. These are not incidental credits. The collaboration between a director experienced in emotionally grounded narrative work and a production house capable of sustaining the period authenticity that Kuala Selangor demands is central to the film's visual identity.
The Kancil Awards recognised the cinematography of Stay with a Craft Kancil entry in the Cinematography: Single category, as recorded by kancilawards.com. This acknowledgement points to the deliberate pictorial choices that distinguish the film from conventional festive advertising. The rural setting of Kuala Selangor is not decorative. It functions as a temporal marker, grounding Xiao Bao's story in a specific historical Malaysia of attap houses, kampung light, and unhurried community life that audiences who lived through the 1980s will recognise and that younger viewers will encounter as heritage.
The writing is equally precise. Senior Chinese Copywriter Yong Jook Yie is credited on kancilawards.com for a script that earned the campaign a Kancil Awards 2025 Merit in the Chinese Copywriting, Content Writing and Scriptwriting: Single category. The trilingual title, rendered as 留 in Chinese, Tetap Di Sini in Malay, and Stay in English, is itself a creative act: each version captures a slightly different emotional register of the same impossible request a child makes of his mother. Art direction by Ooi Hunn Mei and Bong Jo We, also listed by kancilawards.com, supports a colour palette and production design that feel researched rather than stylised, reinforcing the film's claim to historical truth.
Petronas Stay earned three documented recognitions at the Kancil Awards 2025. The campaign won a Silver award in the Film Online: Single category, a Merit award in Chinese Copywriting, Content Writing and Scriptwriting: Single, and a Craft Kancil entry for Cinematography: Single, all as recorded by kancilawards.com and Public Kancilawards. For the Malaysian advertising industry, Kancil recognition in both craft and writing categories simultaneously is a meaningful indicator of a campaign that succeeds at the level of execution as well as concept.
No independently verified viewership figures or engagement metrics for Stay are publicly available beyond the confirmed distribution on PETRONAS's official YouTube and Facebook pages at launch on 22 January 2025, as noted by petronas.com. What can be assessed structurally is the campaign's positioning strength. By anchoring a national energy company to an intimate, historically credible story of maternal sacrifice, Stay performs the precise function that corporate festive advertising must achieve: it shifts the brand from product utility toward emotional citizenship without abandoning cultural specificity.
The decision to premiere on owned social channels rather than paid broadcast reflects a deliberate organic amplification strategy that is consistent with how PETRONAS has distributed festive content in prior years, according to marketing-interactive.com. Within the competitive landscape of Chinese Lunar New Year ads produced in Malaysia in 2025, Stay occupies a position defined by restraint, historical grounding, and craft discipline, qualities that the Kancil jury evidently weighted as distinctly as audiences did.
Petronas Stay is a 2025 Malaysian Chinese New Year film about Xiao Bao, a boy whose mother leaves him with financially stable relatives after the festive season. Set in 1980s Kuala Selangor, the film explores how he comes to understand her selfless sacrifice only years later, as documented on petronas.com.
Caleb Huang directed Petronas Stay. The film was produced by Passion Plus, with Adrian Lai as executive producer, as confirmed by thestar.com.my. The agency behind the campaign is Accenture Song, operating as Accenture Solutions Sdn Bhd, with Zaheer Kaisar as Executive Creative Director, per kancilawards.com.
Petronas Stay won a Silver award in the Film Online: Single category at the Kancil Awards 2025. It also received a Merit in Chinese Copywriting, Content Writing and Scriptwriting: Single, and a Craft Kancil entry for Cinematography: Single, all confirmed by kancilawards.com and public.kancilawards.com.
Petronas Stay was filmed in Kuala Selangor, Malaysia. The rural location grounds the story in 1980s Malaysia, when economic hardship led many families to informally foster children with relatives. According to petronas.com, the setting was chosen to vividly represent the natural beauty and communal warmth of that era.
Petronas Stay premiered on 22 January 2025 in Malaysia, according to petronas.com. The film launched simultaneously on PETRONAS's official YouTube and Facebook pages, using owned channels for initial distribution, consistent with the company's established approach to festive campaign releases as noted by marketing-interactive.com.
Petronas Stay continues a multi-year tradition of narrative festive films. Its closest predecessor is the 2022 campaign Live Again, which featured the seven-episode drama series 366, according to marketing-interactive.com. Stay refines that approach into a single concentrated film, anchored to the Beyond Close Doors thematic platform reported by thestar.com.my.
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