A man with coiffed hair, wearing a long-sleeved floral shirt and grey pants belted almost at chest height lip-syncs a love song, while the object of his affection smiles prettily and shyly evades his advances for roughly two and a half hours.
Apart from the Dhivehi language and the setting – the jetty of one of the Maldives' hundred-odd upmarket resorts (cue sunset, sparkling sea) – the scene could have been pulled from any one of hundreds of Bollywood films. This particular scene, shot in the 1990s, featured two of the most famous Maldivian actors of the era: Mariyam Nisha, and 'Reeko' Moosa Manik. Such was Manik's appeal that one dedicated female fan in the mid 90s was reputed to have swallowed kerosene after accepting that he was out of her reach (thankfully she recovered).
Moosa went on to become a successful businessman, an MP, and a high-profile street activist in the democracy movement of 2005 which toppled Maumoon Abdul Gayoom's 30-year dictatorship, making way for the Maldives' first democratically-elected president, Mohamed Nasheed, in 2008. A divisive figure with a flair for the dramatic, Moosa was much maligned by the remnants of the former regime, who accused him of using his "movie make-up skills" to exaggerate injuries sustained by Nasheed's MPs during regular punch-ups in the country's fractious parliamentary chamber.
Immediately following the ousting of the MDP government in a police-led mutiny on 7 February 2012, Moosa found himself on the receiving end of some of the country's worst police brutality since the pro-democracy marches of 2005. Dragged behind police lines and savagely beaten – "they told me they were going to kill me," he later recalled – Moosa was reportedly saved at the last minute by the intervention of a military officer. He was then hospitalised and flown overseas for surgery. As hospital pictures of the stricken former actor trickled out to the media, commentators peddling the new government's line continued to insist the bandaged head, bloodied shirt, bruising and glazed expression were "the product of fine make-up and acting as per his background."