On 18 October 1987, a soldier went on a murderous amok with an M-16 in Kuala Lumpur 's Chow Kit district. Due to circumstances peculiar to the time and place, this became the trigger for a citywide panic amid rumours of racial riots. Nine days later marked the start of an infamous Internal Security Act clampdown, "Operation Lalang." The subsequent months also saw a certain shift in the Malaysian public's perceptions of the police, media, judiciary, royalty and political process. The Big Durian is a fiction/documentary hybrid in which 23 Malaysians (some real, some fictitious) talk about how the chain of events affected them ... or not.