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Review: Nakorn-Sawan (2018)

May 22, 2019, 5:00 pm
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"Is sadness and sorrow the same thing?"

At the heart of Nakorn-Sawan, a master's thesis film by Puangsoi "Rose" Aksornsawang, lies this question. No doubt the film is drawn from deeply personal wells of grief, capturing the filmmaker’s bittersweet negotiation of her mother’s passing. Nakorn-Sawan’s overall arc is braided together by a “real” narrative and a fictional one. The former is a scrapbook-salad of handheld video footage and intimate photographs; the latter, however, is a thoughtful arrangement of stylised scenes coloured over with the hues of wistful retrospection.


Because both timelines are at once parallel and yet an endlessly echoed specter of each other, it is easy to classify Nakorn-Sawan as a docudrama that straddles (or smudges) obvious binaries. The documentary elements of it are clear as day. Her family members are forthcoming with their thoughts and stories, though they seem ambushed by the camera’s awkward angles – you get a sense in which you have quietly snuck past the threshold into the secret inner chambers of Rose’s memory. Thus, when the more dramatic scenes kick in – you know, the scenes that have been carefully scripted, composed, filmed and cut – the fictionalised nature of these re-imaginings is starkly palpable. The gestus of each narrative is that it is always vaguely pantomiming the presence of the other, even as it asserts itself, making Nakorn-Sawan a meditation on the gaps between pain and memory.

What is less revealing about the film, though, is its nature of encompassing both itself as well as the process of its becoming. Much like the boat that brings Aoey (Prapamonton Eiamchan) and her family on her mother’s final send-off, Nakorn-Sawan ferries the audience along a story and disembarks us alternately between the retelling and the reimagining. In trying to piece memory together – remembering, reenacting, refining, reversing and then redoing – the film captures the transformation of Rose’s psyche as she wades through sorrow. In other words, Nakorn-Sawan is as much the endpoint of Rose’s grieving process as it is the journey itself.



Watching the film gives one a sense that even the film is unsure about what to do with so much grief. Is sadness fuel for a creative engine, helping spur one into making art as a coping mechanism? Does sadness transform into catharsis once it is repackaged for the big screen, or does it remain a steady, pulsating undercurrent? In the question, posed by Aoey as she tries to grapple with her loss, "sadness" and "sorrow" are but shorthand for the impermanence of her grief. Still raw, still fresh, the film seems to know that only time will tell.

"Sadness is sadness," is all she can say.

SINdie spoke to Rose to delve deeper into her thoughts on the making of Nakorn-Sawan.

SINdie: Which films or filmmakers did you draw inspiration from when conceptualising Nakorn-Sawan?

Rose: Chantal Akerman is one of my most recent inspirations. Any news from home reminds me of when I was making this film. Identity and the relationship between daughter and mother move me a lot, and it has become the area which I am interested to explore more and try to understand by making more films.


What led you to settle on the docudrama format of presenting your story?

I decide to make it hybrid since my initial idea was to make a film. I wanted to conceptualise a personal story split into two parts. The first part was my personal self presenting a documentary. In the other part I wanted to put some a distance between me and the story, or at least to see how far I could tell a personal story if spun into a fictional narrative. After re-watching the footage, I reconstructed my memory by creating a fictional part to experiment with the documentary part. I’d already mixed fiction and non-fiction in the script.

What was the process of writing this film like?

It's more about looking back at what materials I'd collected while I was living far away from home. I experimented with the process through footage, notes, photos that my mom had sent over chat applications and I tried to write from those. For the fictional part, I developed it further from a short story that I had written so it's more like a collaboration of ideas and memory fragments. I randomly put both the fictional and documentary parts together to see how they interacted, but first I communicated these through writing.


How much of the "fictional" narrative was drawn from real-life, and how much entirely made up?

I can't really evaluate how much was fictional. I wanted to play with how truthful you can perceive a story to be. Most stories, personally speaking, are borrowed from your experiences together with memory, tales, expectations or even things that never happen. Like, you try to merge everything to 'tell' a 'story'. So from my perspective, my story is all made up but it collects things from real-life, adds, reduces and stylizes.

What aspects of yourself do you see reflected in Aoey?

Aoey is a fictional character that helps myself to narrate those feelings of mine that I can't say or I want to say.


In another article, I read that Nakorn-Sawan translates to "Paradise City". What, therefore, does a paradise city mean to you?

Sawan could be translated to Heaven. Nakorn means city. I like the hyphen that I put in the middle of city and heaven. For me, it's like life after death. It's somewhere in between. It could be interpreted as a level of loss for me, like passing through this city from loss to another level of life. You have lost something or someone but life goes on in the end. I'm just passing through this city, this area. But I don't say that the next city would be better or worse. It's like you just have to pass through it anyway.

How has the making of this film helped you in the process of grieving your mother’s passing?

Personally, it wasn't a process of me dealing with death. I mean it could have happened subconsciously, but for me it was a process of making a film with the intention to tell a story of loss, love and death. It's more like after making this film, it has become another aspect of my life now.

Written by Eisabess Chee
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ShoutOUT! Call for entries to pitches at the 20th Asian TV Forum

May 25, 2019, 12:03 am
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Calling all writers, directors, animators, the Asian TV Forum (ATF), a platform in Asia that connects influential industry players in the entertainment content industry across all genres and platforms is back and will be celebrating its 20th Anniversary this year. They are looking for pitch submissions on scripts, animation ideas and new concepts!

As with previous years, there are pitch competitions that aim to bring the best out of Asian content makers, exposing these ideas for export and development within or outside of the region. Finalists stand a chance to win cash prizes to develop their winning concept or earn once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to have their script scouted and purchased. There are 3 main pitch programmes; ATF Chinese Pitch, ATF Animation Pitch and ATF Formats Pitch. All are open to individuals, students, freelancers and companies who have the idea and dare to dream big.

The ATF Chinese Pitch encourages creators to submit scripts for movies and drama series which has potential to expand into Chinese-speaking territories. All scripts submitted has to be in Chinese language or translated into Chinese language. It includes 2 distinct pitches in the movie and online drama series space, across all genres.
Learn more here.

  • 15 May 2019: Call for submissions open
  • 15 August 2019: Deadline for treatment submissions
  • 15 October 2019: Deadline for scripts submissions
  • 20 November 2019: Finalists announced
  • 4 December 2019: Live Pitch

The ATF Animation Pitch is the premier Asian pitching competition for individuals, students and small to medium sized companies with new & innovative concepts in animation in a variety of genres including comedy, adventure, action and fantasy, targeting at kids of all ages.

This is a platform that showcases Asian originality, and exposes ideas for export and development within and outside of the region.

The winner will receive a US$19,000 prize, comprising a US$2,500 cash award and a consultancy package to the value of US$16,500, tailor made for the winner to develop their animation, making it ready to pitch to broadcasters. Clickhere to read more.

  • 1 April 2019: Call for entries opens
  • 20 October 2019: Deadline for entries
  • 1 November 2019: Finalists official announcement
  • 4 December 2019: Finalists rehearsal
  • 5 December 2019: Live Pitch


The ATF Format Pitch is designed to discover innovative concepts for new and original non-scripted entertainment formats from the pan-Asian region. The winner will receive S$3,500 in cash to develop the idea. More information can be foundhere.

  • 15 May 2019: Call for entries opens online
  • 20 October 2019: Deadline for entries
  • 11 November 2019: Finalists official announcement
  • 4 December 2019: Rehearsal meeting for the finalists
  • 5 December 2019: Live Pitch

Submissions will be reviewed by judges from prominent brands in the industry. Shortlisted projects will be announced on ATF official website by late October/early November 2019. Finalists will gather at ATF for a Live Pitching sessions, where the winners will be announced.
Submission is FREE. It is not required to be a registered attendee of ATF to enter this competition.
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Review: Jonaki (2018)

May 25, 2019, 8:47 pm
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Lolita Chatterjee’s final role before her death last May is the titular Jonaki, a lady on her deathbed.  Director Aditya Vikram Sengupta’s second film is composed of tableaux after tableaux, perhaps dreamed up by Jonaki, of her younger years. She recalls her exacting mother (Ratnabali Bhattacharjee), a plant-obsessed father (Sumanto Chattopadhyay) and a Christian lover (Jim Sarbh).



Aditya describes Jonaki as "a recollection of memories and thoughts from the unfulfilled life of an 80-year-old woman." The film is inspired by the life of his grandmother. In Bengali, Jonaki means firefly.

Every image in Jonaki is carefully considered. Aditya has a fine eye for light and depth. The film moves on in a slow lull, which allows the viewer’s gaze to wander about and uncover the details. 

The scene takes precedence over nature. So much so that I felt alienated from the person of Jonaki. Even as Jonaki’s life plays out, the dreary, decaying landscape that recurs throughout the film is a constant reminder of old age and death. There is no riot in youth, no flash of colour in romance, and no uncertainty. Every recollection is an extension of the image of Jonaki stretched out on a hospital bed. The tableaux acquire a singularity in this way. The few moments in the film spent outside of Jonaki’s dreamscape were the most lively. 



Each scene holds together on its own. However, Aditya falls short in integrating his images. The impression left by a symbol in one scene is crowded over by subsequent symbols. Keeping track becomes a formulaic exercise – a bathtub, a mosquito net, toy soldiers, firecrackers, and oranges. Individually, the impressions lose intensity. And because how the rhythm in one scene flows to the next isn’t pronounced, the string of impressions falls flat.

Ghassan Kanafani writes in the short story “The Land of Sad Oranges” of a man for whom “the well-tended orange trees which he had bought one by one were printed on his face and reflected in the tears.” Oranges are oranges in Jonaki. They complete the scene but not Jonaki’s face and tears. 

Overall, Aditya’s camera is more canvas than eye. Canvas is more resistant to failure than the eye, but it doesn’t grow old and sick.

Review by Teenli Tan

Jonaki will screen on 26 May at 5pm at the Oldham Theatre, National Archives of Singapore as part of the 2019 Singapore International Festival of Arts.  

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Dealing with Demons: Daniel Hui on trauma, dissociation and power

May 25, 2019, 9:16 pm
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“Why should I use you as my actress?” asks Daniel (played by Glen Goei), as he sits across from Vicki (played by Yanxuan Vicki Yang), a prospective actor seeking to star in his new theatre production. They sit in a brightly lit room, windows open as a crowd gathers outside, observing them intently, almost with voyeuristic delight. Indeed, it does take a voyeuristic turn when an onlooker crudely asks why Vicki hasn't taken her clothes off yet, to which Daniel responds, “They want a show”. What happens next isn't shown on screen, but the allusions are clear enough. Daniel’s choice of words are telling––the active act of ascribing a gender to the profession rather than opting for the neutral alternative down to the verb in question: use. The question is tricky as it implies the willing exchange of power and perhaps questionably, of consent. 

A few minutes later, we see Vicki sobbing as she sits with her brother, Viknesh (played by Viknesh Kobinathan), and he says something along the lines of, “This is what you wanted though, isn't it?” The circumstances are more than problematic, but it's the context in which these characters are situated, and it's clear from that moment on, what this film is about. 


This is how Singaporean director Daniel Hui’s Demons (2018) opens, in medias res, as we see a clear delineation of power and authority between director and actor. Following from Hui’s experimental documentary feature Snakeskin (2014), Demons is autobiographical in its exploration of trauma, dissociation, and power. As Hui described during the post-screening Q&A:
Fundamentally, [the film] is also an exploration between the inner self and the other, and how you can easily become the ‘other’ to yourself. That is kind of like my obsession in filmmaking, how you can become the biggest stranger to yourself––when you don’t trust yourself or when your self betrays you or when your self keeps interrogating you. That boundary between that very stable sense of self and that self that does not exist anymore. A person who experiences trauma would not be able to say very comfortably ‘I think this way’ or ‘I feel this way’ because you are constantly doubting yourself... I am more interested in the idea of power, how it can be abused in many ways, in an artistic process, or lyrical process or even sexual process.
Though the film made its debut at last year’s Busan International Film Festival, it was screened for the very first time for Southeast Asian audiences at this year’s Singapore International Festival of the Arts as part of the Asian Film Archive’s Singular Screens selection. 

To describe the film, I’ve seen descriptors such as psychological drama, a personal take on the horror genre, a horror comedy, a satirical horror, or even “Lynchian in a contemporary way”. In many ways, I, too, have struggled to find a cohesive way to describe the film. Highly conceptual, it certainly flirts with the realm of horror and satire, but it never fully dips its toes into either of the two. Perhaps that's why by the end, I felt somewhat unfulfilled and dissatisfied with its ending.


If we argue it’s a horror film, the stylistic references are certainly there. The bright, contrasting hues and splashes of strobing light harken back to the Italian giallo films of the 60s and 70s, and most notably, the sinister, distorted repetition of “obscure” as lights flash in technicolour, mirror the hushed, unsettling repetition of “witch” in the titular track of the score of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977). Much like Suspiria which takes place within the tight-knit community of a dance academy, Demons takes place within the confines of a theatre community. While there's no trace of supernatural matriarchal forces here, Demons is still a film about power: the abuse of it, the displacement of it, and how it manifests in psychological, physical, and emotional ways. Similarly, the grainy, monochromatic, high contrast, slow staggered shots in the void deck of an HDB, overlaid with a drone and chanting vocals eventually came to remind me of the visual and auditory aesthetics of E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten (1990). 


There are also elements of high absurdity, such as when Daniel comes to Vicki and Viknesh’s home for dinner and gifts her what is supposedly a hat but what we see is a fish. She stares at it in disbelief as both her brother and the director ask her to put it on her head while encouraging her to “moo” like a cow, because she supposedly does it so well. Reluctantly complying, she parts her lips to vocalise and no sound comes out; all the while, Daniel and Viknesh continue to laugh. When taken with the overarching theme of the abuse of power, the scene would seem humorous yet unnerving. The laughter from the audience is similarly disconcerting because it implies that we, too, are complicit in enabling Vicki’s trauma––think of it as a form of voyeuristic schadenfreude. When asked about his treatment of irony and of trauma, Hui recalled an apt anecdote:
This film director Seijun Suzuki was very prominent in the 60s in Japan. He was involved in the Pacific War and in the navy and one day, his ship got bombed. The ship sunk and all of them were like striving to survive in the water and he was saying how he was holding on to a plank and he almost died. But he could not stop laughing––he didn’t know why and he just this urge to laugh. When we are made to do something horrible, laughing is a way to help us survive and I think it is a very natural urge for us to laugh. ... Laughter is a kind of defense, something we use to protect ourselves. And even today, when I go through the most terrible things, the first urge is to laugh.
However, the extent to which absurdity is effectively conveyed ultimately falls flat (at least for me). For a film that is naturalistic, engaging with the realms of the real, we're forced to contend with moment of unreality: whether it be by way of scenes of characters putting their ear to a plant, strange noises that only some can hear, doppelgängers that make (unconvincingly) threatening phone calls, and a bizarre crescendo that culminates in a cult-like gathering. The key to effectively conveying absurdity is to clearly define the rules that underscore its manifestation. Are those sounds really being heard? Does the gathering at the end really take place? Are the doppelgängers real? To what extent is the reality unfolding a shared experience––is it just a hallucination? When coupled with elements of horror which naturally demand the suspension of disbelief, the two clash and neither one successfully triumphs over the other.


Despite it all, there are technical elements to be valued. The lo-fi quality of the film, the realistic wardrobe choices, and the occasional hand-held camera work all lend to the naturalistic atmosphere of a reasonable chunk of the film. Much like the gathering crowd in the first few minutes of the film, we feel like observers as much as voyeurs, with many sights, sounds, and situations so familiar. When interspersed with scenes on void decks and common areas of HDB housing, there comes a menacing feel to life in the heartlands of Singapore––hinting that beneath the sunny, clear-skied veneer, there is dormant madness lurking.

Beyond that, it merits unpacking more of the imagery in Hui’s film as that was arguably what I found most satisfying and well-executed. After an unsettling night drive with Daniel, Vicki awakens in her bedroom the following morning. She sits up and cradles her head in her arms and as the camera pans out, nine swords mounted on the wall behind her. 


As an audience member rightfully pointed out (after some proactive googling) during the post-screening Q&A, the arrangement of the swords and Vicki's form exactly mirror the Nine of Swords tarot card. It's a clever, though overt reference and one that I personally appreciated––after all, seeing the Nine of Swords appear during a reading fills me with utter dread. Described as one of the worst cards in the entire Tarot deck, it represents one’s fears, doubts, and pain, heavily weighing on them as signified by the swords overhead. Whether the right side up or reverse, its presence is an ill omen. There is some satisfaction in the nine swords becoming eight later on and how the events in the end of the film eventually mirror a positive reading of an Eight of Swords card in practise instead. 

I left the Oldham Theatre with mixed feelings––captivated in by the rich imagery and symbolism but not entirely convinced with what I'd just seen. For a film that bravely delves into the deepest recesses of the mind, engaging with fears, with the threat of power, and the burden of accountability, I so badly wanted to be able to empathise with these characters a little more. And yet, I found myself unable to.  For me, the problem with Demons is that it's somewhere in the middle: where the rules of this absurd world are unclear and unwritten, and yet despite the universality of the themes being explored, it's hard to feel anything. But maybe that's just my own trauma speaking and maybe that's the point––trauma is personal, the burden of it can be collectively shared but only ever individually felt and eventually, you become too desensitised to feel anything at all.

SINdie had the opportunity to conduct an interview with Daniel Hui. Read on to learn more about his thought process, visual references, and how his thoughts on obedience and authority, shaped the film.

SINdie: The power dynamic that underscores the relationship between director and actor is something that's been in the limelight for the past few years, especially with the rise of the #MeToo movement in 2017. To what extent did this impact your decision to create the film a year on since the movement started? 
DH: We actually started shooting this film in 2016, so way before the #MeToo movement started. We wanted to sort through our own traumas and our own nightmares, and this film comes from that. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the authority of a director—you have so much control over your cast’s words, gestures, emotions, and even thoughts, and that authority has always made me uncomfortable. But of course here, I wasn’t interested in just talking about the power of a director. I wanted to talk about power in general, and the director just represents that. I think there is a sense in certain circles that, since a lot of value is placed on art, artists are beyond reproach as long as they make good art. That is a straight path to abuse of power. But this is definitely not exclusive to art. Obviously it’s the same in politics as well.

SINdie: I think it's interesting that halfway through the film, the narrative shifts in perspective. Based on what you mentioned during the Q&A last Saturday, there was no script for this film. What led to your decision to change perspectives and was that shift planned or something you decided throughout the course of shooting?
DH: There was a script. I just didn’t follow it. I’d been writing the film for two years, but when we shot I would rewrite everything from scratch, based on what we shot the day before and how everyone was feeling that day. So I knew where we were going, just not how to get there.

Anyway, the structure has always been there. This is a very personal film for me, so both characters represent what keep me up at night. In a sense, they are both me. But I wanted especially to show the perspective of the abuser because we all think abuse is something that is only perpetrated by deviants. The reality is that anyone in a position of power is capable of abuse, and the scariest thing to me is that you could have already inflicted trauma on someone without even knowing it. Our position of privilege and power often blinds us to the consequences of our actions. So I wanted to show the abusers as all of us. Because we are all capable of hideous things.

SINdie: There are many striking visual elements in the film--be it the shift in colouring towards the end of the film to the strobing effect that takes place when we Vicki's face splattered with blood. Who were your and your cinematographer's sources of inspiration from a visual standpoint?
DH: For most of the film we didn’t work with visual references. I wanted the film to have the texture of reality, so we mostly shot what was in front of us, which is how I’ve always worked. But for the last scene, things had to be a bit more heightened and hysterical. So I showed Wan Ping, the cinematographer, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) by Kenneth Anger, which was one of the films that marked me when I first started watching cinema. Of course that places our film into a tradition of queer experimental cinema, which continues from Anger through Pink Narcissus (1971). I guess we gays really love our lurid colors.

SINdie: One of the things I really appreciated was the Tarot imagery and the way the cards that featured in the film were pertinent. So, why the Tarot? What made you want to include the imagery in the ways that you did?
DH: I’m not the most knowledgeable person about the Tarot, but I chanced upon the Nine of Swords one day waiting at the airport in Nice. I was in France for FIDMarseille, and I had just missed my flight because of a bad train connection. It was only a few days after the Nice attack, and so the airport was crawling with soldiers carrying huge machine guns. I was stuck there trying to find a flight back home, and it really felt like there was a war going on. That was when I chanced upon the card randomly on the Internet. I thought then that it encapsulated everything I felt — and feel often. Nine swords hanging over a person sleepless and distressed in bed. It totally visualizes the crushing anxiety and depression that paralyze us.

SINdie: I've read in some of your previous interviews that one of the feelings imbued in this film is that quiet sense of rage that one feels in Singapore, the way it gets under your skin and the fact that it has nowhere to go. As a result, you experience this sense of displacement and internal madness from the pressure to conform. When coupled with the theme of the abuse of power in the film, what do you feel that it all says about the culture of authority and obedience in Singapore, and how it comes to affect the way people behave/think?
DH: I want to clarify and say that every society demands conformity from individuals. Perhaps it is much more visible and present in Singapore, because the collective is very important in Singapore. Punishment is often carried out through collective humiliation which, in turn, reinforces the bonds of the collective. Seeing someone else getting punished reminds us that that’s them, not us. It gives us an identity. I still remember how kids were whipped in front of the entire school assembly when I was growing up. Even today, the newspapers still publish the names and pictures of people convicted of the pettiest crimes.

But every society enacts a certain violence on individuals in order for it to function. I guess that’s what I’ve always been interested to explore in my work—the price we pay to tell a coherent story of ourselves, and the trauma this inflicts, whether it is historical or personal.


SINdie: For the most part and from what I've seen, reactions to Demons have been mixed––whether it's from critics or regular viewers who've seen the film during Berlinale and BIFF. What do you think the reaction will be like in Singapore and why? What do you think it says about the culture of arthouse films in the country? 
DH: The film will be released in the cinemas on 15 June, and I’m excited to see how audiences here will take to it! So far it has been very polarizing. This time I’m working in a popular idiom—the horror movie—and of course people will have different opinions on how it should behave.

What I would say about the culture of art house films in Singapore is this—I find it very heartening that the audience for these films here are mostly young people. If you go to see an art house movie in a Western country, you’ll see that the audience is mostly made up of older, retired people. You’ll hardly see a young person in the audience. This is the reason cinema culture is rapidly dying out in these countries. But in Singapore, as with many countries in Asia, the audience is usually very young. It is young people here who are curious and interested in different things. This gives me a lot of hope for cinema here and in the region. It means we have a future. 

Demons had its Southeast Asian premiere at the Singapore International Festival of the Arts’ Singular Screens programme on 18th May and is screening again on 26 May. It will be released in cinemas in Singapore this summer. 

Melissa Noelle Esguerra is a multifaceted writer who likes to explore all things pertaining to art, film, culture, and literature. She obtained her BA (Hons) in English Language & Literature with a minor in Linguistics from New York University. After having spent the last four years in New York City, she now resides in Singapore. 

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Just a boy named ADAM: Filmmaker Shoki Lin shares all

May 27, 2019, 5:00 pm
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The name “Adam” carries baggage of epic proportions. It is an utterance that augurs monumental primacy, and with it: creation, betrayal, sin, temptation, darkness and redemption. Adam, the first emblem of rotten innocence. His story, the backbone of history, is a song that continues to be sung through the ages.

To know this and yet enter ADAM, a short film by NTU School of Art, Design & Media student Shoki Lin, is therefore to know dissonance. In an email interview with SINdie, Lin gave the tonal equivalent of a shrug when quizzed about the title and simply replied, “We chose the name ‘Adam’ as it is not a particularly unique name”—but, he also explained—“and I find it interesting that it is pronounced differently in Malay and English.”


The film, which was selected for this year's Cannes Cinéfondation and also won Best Picture in the 2017 Singapore's National Youth Film Awards, tells the story of a 9-year-old biracial boy struggling to find a sense of belonging. Though ostensibly spanning only a few days in the titular character’s life, the vignette is charged with tension. The camera tracks Adam like a loyal, invisible friend and like this, you easily perceive his unspoken daily toil. Every moment is spent watching him gaze across the immense canyon that separates him from what his heart desires. Therein lies the beginnings of rotten innocence.

The film opens with Adam piloting a remote-controlled battery-operated toy car up and down a flight of stairs. No, correction: the toy car blusters clumsily down the steps, is retrieved after its descent by Adam, who then swiftly repositions it back at the top of the staircase and repeats the whole process. What kind of play is this?, this scene seems to be challenging its audience. Who is this child that he resorts to such play, and why?

As usual, the HDB skyline makes its cameo, but a knowing local will easily spot the nuance: these are shots situated in a rental flat neighbourhood. ADAM was shot on location and this milieu frames the gritty realism of Adam’s story. In fact, Lin explained, “[The] script was constantly evolving even through our pre-production phase. Often times the locations and people I met along the way helped to shape the story.”


All these unfold against the Singapore backdrop, a country frequently touted as a melting pot of races and cultures. It is an iron-cast statement we wear like a badge of honour, reproduced in short, sweet slogans and inscribed into national songs. Yet, ADAM’s concerns of identity should come as no surprise to anyone born and bred of this land. Singaporeans are a people who know how to perform what is expected of them, without interrogating the fissures of their logic or confronting their participation in contradictory realities. Hence, the phrase “racial harmony” may have squirmed its way into our nation-building vocabulary—but what does that even mean?

What Lin called “[the] universal desire to seek a place of belonging” therefore arises from the splitting of Adam’s racial identities. It is universal insofar as everyone wants to belong somewhere. But this is a quagmire specific to Adam because he is unable to locate himself between two communities, despite the longstanding proclamation of Singapore as a place for everyone, regardless of race.

Lin shied away from overtly racialising ADAM, however, and opted to emphasise the film’s focus on a child’s upbringing. “I hope the film allows viewers to see a part of themselves in Adam and think about the significance of home and identity, especially for a child,” said Lin.

Indeed, part of what draws you to Adam is his tender age. It abuses our hearts to know that a child must battle neglect in such Goliathan forms. Unlike his biblical ancestor, our young protagonist is betrayed by most of the adult figures in his life, leaving him a vagabond adorned by the “elusive quality” his name grants him. We wander along with him, searching but not really searching, contemplating but also avoiding. We want something for him—we just don’t know if it’s in our place to want it on his behalf.



The biggest source of indignation comes from knowing and feeling Adam’s powerlessness. As a child, he must rely on the adults around him to provide for him. Yet, time and again, they fail him and he cannot but be buoyed along on waves that threaten to swallow him up. In one scene, he takes his anger out on an object that, unlike the toy car, doesn’t belong to him; shortly after, he’s seen trying to salvage the situation. Adam literally cannot afford to exhibit his feelings—and for a child trapped in this predicament at that age, the feelings are many.

Adam of ADAM is no harbinger of great beginnings. His story is not a story that will reverberate through the ages—it is but a drop in the ocean. His relentless boyishness promises no hope of redemption; again and again, he makes choices that frustrate an adult audience like us, mistakes that tumble further into each other. Yet, it would be remiss of us to wave it off for that alone. Dig deep and you’ll see that sometimes the sincerest, most childlike of tales are the grandest of them all.

Read the full interview with Lin below.

SINdie: Why the name “Adam”? What does it symbolise?

Lin: Adam is the name of main character in the film, a 9-year-old boy who is half Chinese and half Malay. We chose the name “Adam” as it is not a particularly unique name, and I find it interesting that it is pronounced differently in Malay and English. This gives the name an elusive quality which encapsulates the character’s struggle of finding his place in the world.

What inspired you to conceptualise this story?

The story developed in many different directions. I had two different stories which - developed and scrapped before coming up with ADAM. I spoke to various people about their conceptions of identity and parenthood and also thought about the different experiences of growing up in Singapore.

More so than the answers you’re seeking with ADAM, what questions are you asking your audience and/or hoping your audience would ask after watching the film?

The story is simple but it touches upon a universal desire to seek a place of belonging. I hope the film allows viewers to see a part of themselves in Adam and think about the significance of home and identity, especially for a child.



What was the production process like from start to finish?

I started writing the film around April of 2018. There were a lot of re-writes and drafts and the script was constantly evolving even through our pre-production phase. Oftentimes the locations and people I met along the way helped to shape the story.

We started pre-production with location scouting and casting. We went door to door in housing estates to find the house that we felt would fit the characters in the story. We knew the casting of Adam was really tricky and crucial so I decided to street cast. It took us a few weeks of roaming around, looking out for kids in that age group till we found Ayden.

Rehearsals started around two months before the shoot. We were very lucky to have found Ayden as he was able to pick up the story very quickly and delivered performances that were character-motivated.

Shooting took place over four days at the end of December. We had quite a number of locations to cover. We also had long handheld takes which made the shoot challenging. Our cinematographer, Ibrahim, operated the Alexa on his shoulder for long periods of time but he made it look easy!

Post-production was quite rushed as the deadline for Cinéfondation was mid-February. I worked with Azmir our editor, Natasha our sound editor, and Sulwyn our composer during this period. After many long nights, we were able to make it just in time for the submission.



Was the film shot in a low-income or rental neighbourhood? How was it like filming on location?

Yes, the scenes in the houses were shot in rental flats. The process of scouting for locations was really important for me as a writer. It allowed me to meet the people living in those spaces and have a better understanding of how their environment shapes their day to day lives.

We were very fortunate to have found locations that were very close to what we wanted. For instance, we wanted the houses to each have a distinct look and colour palette. Our production designer, Beaunice, did an amazing job in making the spaces feel like they belonged to the characters in the story.

During the shoot we met with a lot of generosity from the neighbours. While prepping one of our locations on Christmas Day, a day prior to our shoot, one of the neighbours invited us for a communal Christmas dinner by the lift landing which we gladly accepted!

How did you & the team feel when you first received the news about being selected for the Cannes Cinéfondation?

I think we all got a big shock when we heard the news. We had planned to submit the film to Cinéfondation but I don't think any of us expected anything to come of it. It is a real honour to be part of such a prestigious film festival and I still find it hard to believe that we are actually here in Cannes.

Moving ahead, what do you foresee for yourself and the Singaporean film industry, given that we’re currently in the midst of what has been coined the “Singapore New Wave”?

I'm not really sure how to answer that as I can't speak for the industry as a whole, but if anything, I'm happy to be able to contribute to the “Singapore New Wave” in my own little way.

It is always inspiring to see local filmmakers being recognised for their work, especially on an international stage, and I am motivated to want to continue telling stories through film. I hope to be able to make a feature one day.


Written by Eisabess Chee
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Review: Krasue: Inhuman Kiss (2019)

June 2, 2019, 2:16 am
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Movie producers need to make up their minds about whether to scare or to enchant. Genre-benders have had a field day in the cinemas in recent years, though one genre usually gets the better of the other in the films. There is the ‘horredy’, which are often comedies at heart but transplanted into spooky settings and often peppered with horror cliches. Then, there are horror-fantasies, which are essentially fantasies that take you on dark detours, appealing to fans of Harry Potter and the likes, with mainly monsters forming the scare elements. Romance and horror on the other hand, actually make good bedfellows. Romanticism enriches the narrative base for horror and horror gives a sense of urgency to romance, sort of like how one finds solace in the other, while they both go on a exorcistic mission.

Krasue: Inhuman Kiss, directed by Sitisiri Mongkolsiri and written by Chookiat Sakveerakul, is a softer take on an age-old Southeast Asian (though some would claim it is Thai) fable about the Krasue, a flying female head with organs dangling from her neck, which goes around looking for flesh to feast on. Softer, because this 2019 take on a familiar demon, attempts to humanise the demon, by focussing on the love story between Sai, who turns into a Krasue at night, and Noi, her lover. Sai is the village nurse who had a supernatural encounter as a little girl and was soon to discover the consequences of that fateful encounter. Bleeding puddles on her bedsheets, and feeling asphyxiated by the dilation of arteries from her chest to her neck, Sai soon realises that the village myths about Krasues are no kiddy bedtime stories and she may be hosting the devil herself. At the same time, a monster-busting squad, which has been travelling from village to village hunting down Krasues, arrives in Sai’s village, ushered in by Noi, who somehow hastily fell in love in Sai.


The village exorcist squad

The above pretty much explains the narrative set up of the film - a woman being both a monster to her village and a lover to her childhood sweetheart, and Noi has the difficult task of hiding the truth from the village and the exorcist squad. Alongside this main narrative arc, is a love triangle element between Sai and Jerd, another childhood friend, as well as the sideshow of the Krahang’s witchhunt - the Krahang, being the male version of the Krasue, according to folklore. In trying to weave in so many plotlines and lay down scare trapdoors for the audience, the filmmakers sacrificed some basic elements in storytelling, chiefly the process of falling in love. Noi was Sai’s childhood friend who had disappeared from the village to Bangkok. Upon his reappearance, the film wasted no time coupling the two, using the fact Sai had been pining for Noi since his absence as a convenient bridge, just so that film could get on with its main plotline.
Childhood pals Noi, Sai and Jerd

Childhood pals Noi, Sai and Jerd
Phantira Pipityakorn does a convincing job playing Sai, displaying a range of personas from that of a tenacious and brave nurse to a petrified and vulnerable Krasue-in-transition. However, her portrayal fails to help cover up the film’s CGI shortcomings. My technical estimations tells me it is inherently challenging to create a realistic looking flying human head using CGI. Perhaps, it’s about the shading or the tiny facial movements. It did not help that the Krasue head had a red glow from its dangling heart, making it look like a flying lantern as it whizzed above the tree canopies. A shortfall in technical skills aside, the film also suffers from a paradox of technological advancement, creating monsters that are too vivid. Two letters diluted the horror - HD. A little bit more mystery and obscured vision would have heightened the creepiness. Speaking of technology, a 1981 film version of the Krasue tale (or rather Leyak, as it is called in Indonesia), called Mystics in Bali, demonstrates what filmmakers played around with in the era of analog. Kitschy as it may look, it still manages to tingle your spine a little.


So in the genre spectrum between romance and horror, does Krasue: Inhuman Kisssit nicely on the hybrid sweet spot? Horror certainly played second fiddle to the romance between two ill-fated lovers and the film’s message about love transcending physicality or humanality was stridently clear. But in honesty, the film’s best payoff was in its fantasy tropes, of how the villagers dealt with monsters from their folklore, pyrotechnic battles between flying creatures, blood-curdling bodily transformations and most of all, the kick of seeing human heads yank themselves off from their bodies!

Review by Jeremy Sing

'Krasue: Inhuman Kiss' opens in all cinemas in Singapore on 13 June 2019. It had its European premiere at the Far East Udine Film Festival and has been sold to 11 Asian territories.
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ShoutOUT! Horror festival Scream Asia returns with a regional short film compeition

June 5, 2019, 7:28 am
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Horror film festival Scream Asia by mm2 Entertainment and Cathay Cineplexes is returning for a second year with a new focus on a regional short film competition. With the aim to develop the horror film industry, Scream Asia 2019 hopes to identify and groom potential horror filmmakers around Asia by giving them a platform to showcase their talents through directing a short film.

Submissions will open on 17 June 2019 and closes on 19 September 2019. A total of 15 finalists will be selected for the Awards Ceremony – scheduled for 26 October 2019 – where the top three winners will be announced.

Winning entries will be awarded cash prizes amounting to a total of USD9,500 and one of the Top 3 directors will be selected by mm2 Entertainment to develop a feature film.

“After our successful run last year, I’m excited to make Scream Asia a platform for discovering new horror filmmaking talents from the region. This year we will introduce the Short Film Competition where winning entries stand a chance to be developed into feature films!” said Eric Khoo, Scream Asia’s Creative Director.

Besides the short film competition, Scream Asia will also conduct a masterclass taught by established filmmaker Giddens Ko. The 2018 Scream Asia masterclasses featured the directors Yeon Sang-ho from South Korea and Joko Anwar from Indonesia. Scream Asia 2019 will also feature selected horror film screenings at Cathay Cineplexes. The film lineup will be announced in August. The masterclasses and horror film screenings will be held in late October 2019.
Masterclasses with (Top) Yeon Sang-Ho and (Bottom) Joko Anwar at Scream Asia 2018

Giddens Ko better known by his pen-name Jiubadao (Nine Blades in Mandarin), directed Mon Mon Mon Monster (2017) and You Are The Apple Of My Eye (2011), which received the NH Audience Award at the 21st Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival.
“A horror film is a global genre because people are interested in horror cultures in different countries. Asia’s ghost culture is closely linked with the people’s desires and thus reflects Asian values. Today’s horror audiences are much more savvy and are no longer scared by standard horror filmmaking scenes. I hope to see horror films that induce fear with creative methods, such as a horror film with no ghosts which tells the horror of everyday life,” said Giddens Ko.

“When we launched Scream Asia last year, our aim was to bring lesser known horror films to the Singapore audience. This year, the focus is on filmmakers, and Asia has a rich tapestry of supernatural folklore to draw on. The 2019 edition of Scream Asia will give filmmaking talents in the region the platform to tell compelling horror stories and showcase their short films,” said Mr Ng Say Yong, mm2 Entertainment’s Managing Director.

Scream Asia Horror Short Film Competition is open to any applicants with residency or citizenship to any Asian country, and are at least 18-years-old as of 17 June 2019. Submitted films must be shorter than 15 minutes and originally made within the past 12 months as of 19 September 2019.
Scream Asia judges (from left) Eric Khoo, Giddens Ko and Thomas Nam

The top three winners will be picked by acclaimed director Eric Khoo from Singapore, film programmer Thomas Nam from South Korea  (Network of Asian Fantastic Films NAFF Managing Director) and Giddens Ko from Taiwan.

For more information, please visit
Festival website: www.screamasia.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/screamasiafilmfest
Instagram: www.instagram.com/screamasiafilmfest
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ShoutOUT! Grandpa takes home top honours at this year's ciNE65 film competition

June 14, 2019, 8:13 pm
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 Winner of ciNE65 Movie Makers Award and Overall Best Film (Student Category)  My Homeland: A Photography Project by Grandpa Chen

At the biennial ciNE65 short-film competition in Singapore, out of the 113 entries, My Homeland: A Photography Project by Grandpa Chen took home the top honours for the ciNE65 Movie Makers Award and the Overall Best Film (Student Category) for its moving story on what makes Singapore our home. Its director, Jastine Tan, a student from Temasek Polytechnic, also clinched a feature film deal with mm2 Entertainment. Temasek Polytechnic also received the Inter-School Challenge Trophy for submitting the highest number of quality entries under the Student Category. 


 Still from My Homeland: A Photography Project by Grandpa Chen



The Overall Best Film for the Open Category went to $ingapura, which also won Best Screenplay. Winners of the Overall Best Film Award also walked away with an overseas learning trip to the Busan International Film Festival 2019, in addition to cash prizes and Panasonic cameras. After five days of public film screening, Echoes of 1965 was voted Favourite Film for the ciNE65 Festival Audience Choice Awards. 

$ingapura - Winner of Best Film and Best Screenplay in the open category



一人一半 -  Winner of Best Direction, Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction in the open category




 Echoes of 1965 - Winner of audience choice awards and Best Editing in the student category



Broken - Winner of Best Direction in the student category


Organised by Nexus, Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) and media entertainment company, mm2 Entertainment, the competition carried the theme Singapura. This year is the Singapore Bicentennial. 





Photos courtesy of ciNE65 and Bryson Ng

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Review: Nobody (2019)

June 14, 2019, 11:34 pm
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It really takes a lot to scare people these days. After all, reality is stranger than fiction now. For reference, just turn on the news. In Nobody, Eric Khoo’s installment to the HBO Folklore series that was curated as part of the Asian Film Archive’s ‘Fear of Monsters’ screening series, the trope of modern day slavery in Singapore ringed louder than the screeching of its pontianak character. Humans are portrayed to be more frightening than ghosts and rightfully so. 


Nobody tells the story of a Chinese construction worker who, ignorant of Malay superstitions, removed a nail from the neck of a corpse discovered at the work site, which he was tasked to dispose. Folklore plot component: the nail on the neck is believed to prevent the spirit of the female deceased will return to haunt humans as a pontianak. Largely a kamic tale, the film begins with despotic employers and wardens going about with their bullying and offers payoffs in the form of their gory demise towards the end. The pontianak in this film knows the right people to kill. So in fact, we sit alongside the devil in this one and cheer on when the bad guys get their comeuppance. But inadvertently, the film’s spook factor is sacrificed. 


On closer look, the film seems to not take itself too seriously in certain aspects. The opening scene of the young towkay giving his warden a verbal shelling, who in turn relays the anger to Siva, the construction worker, is nothing short of a caricature. Strokes of Phua Chu Kang (famous Singapore TV contractor character) in the styling of the towkay and even the warden (tight hair curls, signature Versace prints) are evident. Is this pandering to a TV audience since its HBO, or was it a wardrobe malfunction? The film could also have worked harder in the special effects department. At times, the appearance of the pontianak seemed nondescript - the camera would pan and suddenly out of a corner crawls the harmless-looking child monster without much ‘fanfare’. Also, most would have been ‘delighted’ at a more graphic killing of the towkay in his bathtub. Perhaps the most chilling moment of the entire film was when the Chinese workers yanked the 6-8 inch long nail out of the corpse’ neck. 

Nobody is what Chris Yeo’s award-winning A Land Imagined would have been if the audience could choose its ending. Justice is served to bullies and tormentors in the context of the supernatural, an outcome that is sadly, closer to fiction than reality in Singapore. Perhaps, it is the curse of TV, where there is a need to conclude if it pays to be a good or bad guy, which evidently informs much of the direction and characterisation. Where is the film does redeem itself is in creating characters that are easy to access and care about (and construction workers are certainly the flavour of the period!), a major distraction from the fact that the scares in Nobody were literally child’s play.

Review by Jeremy Sing
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'Stay Awake, Be Ready': An Interview with Pham Thien An

June 16, 2019, 5:00 pm
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The story behind the newly crowned Illy Prize winner for best short film at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight 2019 began as it does in the film—with a motorcycle crash, a fire breathing boy, a night of drinking and ruminations on human destiny.

It was at a street food stall that Vietnamese writer-director Pham Thien An recognised the vast canvas of humanity on display. Between the street hawkers, the fire breathers and the alcohol promoters, he saw a motley crew united in their quest to survive—an unseen cosmic thread that runs through humanity.

Stay Awake, Be Ready is spiritual cinema at its most naturalistic. No grand miracles occur over its 14-minute runtime, yet I left the film feeling smaller than ever and more aware that the universe is more than what we see.

“Human faith swells up real quick when they’re on their last breath,” observes our protagonist. An is interested in what we fall back on when life spirals out of hand. He bookends his musings with two accidents that shatter any semblance of self-determination we might have. These disruptions bring together a pseudo-prophet and his would-be disciples. Naturally, he preaches a short sermon over hotpot and beer, and it’s as memorable as any you’d find in a church.

Equally memorable is An's very deliberate direction. He stages the entire film in a single take on a busy street corner, orchestrating a ballet with a dozen extras and motorcycles, not to mention some prominent usage of fire and rain. Camera movement is minimal but meaningful. In an inspired move, he pulls the camera out to a wide shot for the film’s centrepiece conversation and it’s enough to suggest the presence of a higher power. No special effects needed. The thoughtful choreography of camera and cast is well worth the watch, even if you care not for its message.



SINdie conducted an email interview with writer-director Pham Thien An on his short film Stay Awake, Be Ready.

SINdie: Congratulations on taking home the Illy Prize at Directors’ Fortnight! What was the inspiration behind Stay Awake, Be Ready?

Pham Thien An: Thank you so much! The story emerged after I witnessed a young boy fire breathing by a street stall in Vietnam. After his performance, he went from table to table selling candy. I observed many shades of humanity in that one night, many people focused on earning a living.

Society makes people rush from day to day and we often think of ourselves as the centre of the universe, until we’re not. I added in the motorbike accident as it’s a common occurrence over here, and interwove it with the fire breather boy to spark a conversation between three young men about human destiny.

I was struck by how you approached spiritual themes with a very naturalistic style. Can you share about how you approached this film, and why you chose to approach it in this naturalistic manner?

I wanted to combine the tremendous and the trivial without putting too much stress on the audience. Adopting a naturalistic approach was a way to create an opportunity for contemporary viewers to perceive themselves before the universe in the simplest way, in a manner that was familiar to real life.

Your film plays out in an unbroken 14-minute long take. Tell me more about the process of shooting it. Why did you choose to shoot it in a long take, and did you feel it was a crucial element of your film?

I chose to use the long take to immerse viewers in the spiritual world of the film. The goal was to get them to forget the camera’s presence and to create a real-time authenticity that relates back to the naturalistic approach to the film.

We rehearsed for four days with the main cast, one day with the camera movement and five hours with the extras before rolling the camera. This single shot took more than 100 people to pull off!

SINdie: What was the biggest challenge in making this film, and how did you overcome it?

The biggest challenge was finding the location and getting the permit to block the street for the shoot. We had a laundry list of criteria and scouted for many days before chancing upon this beautiful street corner. We secured the permit with the support of CJ Short Film Making Project.

I found your direction to be very assured and precise. It was a very complex shot, but it never felt out of control. How did you hone such stylistic clarity? Tell us about your background and the influences that shaped you into the director you are today.

Directors that have influenced me include Michael Haneke, Theo Angelopoulos, Béla Tarr and Andrei Tarkovsky. Inspired by their slow filmmaking, I had experimented with static and long shots in my previous short film. I found it really effective in integrating the viewer with the world in the film, by giving them the space to breathe.

So for this film, I envisioned the camera movement and frame composition while I was still sketching out the initial script idea. Connecting the composition with the actions of the characters provided greater clarity and the one full day of camera rehearsal gave me the confidence to make the film.

What can we expect from you next?

I am working on my debut feature film Inside The Yellow Cocoon Shell, based on Stay Awake, Be Ready.

Interview answers have been edited for clarity.




Written by Joshua Ng
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What You Don't See: An Interview with James Page

June 18, 2019, 5:42 pm
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We often forget the individuals who have poured countless hours into achieving what we see on screen. Beyond the visuals, the writing, and the performances is the world the characters inhabit. Individuals like James Page are essential to constructing these worlds.

As a production designer, Page helps determine every prop and location we see on screen. As Page puts it, “It can range from the houses or rooms down to the choice of pencil”. That said, it is never enough to say that production design dictates the “look” of a film. How a fictional world is dressed can reflect upon a film’s characters, and how the characters reflect upon it. This gives us the ability to immerse ourselves in these fictional realities. All this exemplifies how important a role production designers such as Page play.

Even if you are unfamiliar with what his line of work encompasses, you will most likely be familiar with his work. As a frequent collaborator with local filmmakers, the likes of which include Boo Junfeng, K Rajagopal, Nicole Midori Woodford and Yeo Siew Hua, he has designed for various acclaimed features and shorts in and around Singapore. In 2010 and 2016, he designed for Boo’s films, Sandcastle and Apprentice, respectively. Also in 2016, he designed for Rajagopal in his debut feature, A Yellow Bird. All 3 films mentioned were screened at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Page most recently designed for Yeo on A Land Imagined, which won the the Locarno Film Festival’s top prize, the Golden Leopard, last year. He has also collaborated with acclaimed video artists like Ho Tzu Nyen on projects such as The Cloud of Unknowing, which was Singapore’s entry for the Venice Biennale in 2011.

James in deep waters on the set of 'The Cloud of Unknowing'

A Yellow Bird

These projects are only a few of many which make up Page’s prolific career in production design. He is currently designing for director Wong Chen-Hsi on her upcoming film, City of Small Blessings, which is currently in production.

Amidst his hectic shoot, SINdie was fortunate enough to sit down with him to discuss his roots in theatre, his love for the craft, and the future of filmmaking in Singapore.

SINdie: How did you get started?

James: I’d say I started in Theatre. When I studied I was more based in Theatre in the UK. I came to Singapore and started interning with TheatreWorks. I also met Fran Borgia. This was back in 2008, 2009. He was working with Ho Tzu Nyen and they were going to do a King Lear project. At the same time, I was also interning on a film called Untold Beauty. That opened quite a few doors. As time went on, I found myself naturally doing more and more film work, and less and less theatre.

I’m guessing your time in theatre proved useful when it came to designing for film.

What was very useful for me was this emphasis on reading a script and really understanding who the characters are and what their worlds should be. Also, as a student in the UK, I was very used to doing DIY low budget kind of stuff. In film when you want to see an elephant, you see an elephant, but in theatre, when you want to see an elephant, it could be a metaphor. You see things not so literally when you’re starting with that theatrical side because sets are rarely super realistic in a theatre. It’s not so often done. Normally its more about metaphorical, symbolic presence. An entire house can be substituted by a chair and a light. I like that a part of my brain still thinks that way.

What’s the first film that comes to mind when you think of incredible production design?

(laughs) Here’s the thing, a lot of people might think of the original Star Wars. But as a kid, I never really liked sci-fi. I used to like the brutal realism of 1970s New York, those kind of films, like The French Connection, or Dog Day Afternoon. In the UK it was films like Get Carter. They were the films I loved as a kid. They have this kind of realism that is quite brutal –– quite location heavy. When I go back to the films that really moved me, it was things like Get Carter, which was set in Newcastle in the 70s. It depicted this beauty in ugliness. I think something can be so gritty that it becomes beautiful, and that has always been something that I always liked. There are astonishing films like Star Wars with mind blowing production design and I completely respect them, but for me that has never been my love.


Is there a reason why you are drawn to gritty realism?

You have to be realistic. We’re in Singapore, and we’re in a film industry that cannot and will not pay to create another 2001: A Space Odyssey––the budgets aren’t there. In the end you’re going to top yourself if you think you’re going to achieve those hopes and dreams of completely building towns and cities or huge sets from scratch. In a way I don’t have any issue with that. Gritty realism to me is like being pragmatic. How can we make films which can still be beautiful, relevant, and really interesting? A Land Imagined, A Yellow Bird, I mean, all of them are up there. Visually, they’re really interesting, but it doesn’t require a huge amount of money. What it does require is a kind of eye––spotting how you’re going to get bang for your buck, and how does this look great without having to spend millions of dollars on building. It’s a bit of a sad question with a sad answer.

A Land Imagined

Apprentice

What’s your favourite part of the process?

I think my favourite is always the start, actually. I really love the start when you first read the script. You begin to chart what the director envisions for the characters. Then the research stage, where you begin to see what their world would be. Quite often it’s for your own personal satisfaction. No one may get it, but it’s just knowing that you’re getting those little snippets of the characters in for the benefit of those seeing it. With Apprentice for example, that was very heavy on its research and constrained by information restrictions. It’s almost like a game––like, how much information can you get, and how close can you get to reality?


What do you think a director looks for in a production designer?

They’ve (production designers) got to listen. It’s really important that they read the script, and respect the fact that scripts in Singapore are quite often written by the Director as well. Don’t promise things that you can’t give because that’s a dangerous route to go on. I would say it’s a combination of someone who is pragmatically capable of creating what is required and yet, at the same time, inventive enough to think out of the box and think of how you’re going to achieve something different within a restrictive environment. It’s not a “money’s no object” world. It has to fit within a budget and a time frame. It has to fit within the capability of everyone. At the end of the day, the number one is communication –– the ability to work with the DP, Gaffer, Director, and the Soundman.


Let me flip the question on its head––what do you think a production designer looks for in a director?

Ideally it’s a director with a clear vision and the ability to not compromise but to be open to input from the heads of department. They have their script, they have their vision––everyone’s working to achieve it. But quite often, the DP may say, “Actually, if we shoot it this way, we can create something far better”, or the production designer may say, “We can’t find this location, but actually, this character with this location, may add something to the film, can we adapt the script to accommodate that?”. If they (directors) don’t like them, so be it, but at least be open to them. And research. It’s really important that a director does their homework.

It’s such a tough job being a director, and I think a lot of people underestimate how unbelievably stressful it can be, because at the end of the day, you (the director) are the captain of the ship. When things begin to go a little bit wrong, everyone will be looking to the director for guidance.

How do you think Singapore’s film industry has progressed?

If you look back 10 years ago, there was Eric Khoo and Royston Tan, but you now have Kirsten Tan, Chris Yeo, Raja, Junfeng, I could keep on going. There’s definite progress. I have faith. I think the exposure in Singapore is so great. I think my question is –– in terms of business, in terms of market, how do you help a director who’s gotten to a certain stage, to go on to the next stage without having to leave their country? Because this industry probably won’t be able to sustain the next step. So you start losing your talent, and that would be a shame. They want to push themselves to the max, and if they simply cannot do it here, then you cannot expect them not to move on. I hate to say it, but how do you monetise? How do you sustain it? Because it has to be done. It’s tough.

James (second from right) and the team from 'A Land Imagined' at the 29th Singapore International Film Festival

Speaking of which, is there anything that has not seen as much progress?

I think where we are now as an industry compared to 10 years ago, there has been progress in terms of films that are being released and produced. But has there been progress in terms of scale and size? Maybe not as much. There are films that are done incredibly well, but they are still done on incredibly low budgets. And personally I find that every year the budget doesn’t go up. I feel that every year the budget either stays the same or in some cases, goes down. In that sense, there is a problem, but I don’t know how to fix that, I’m just a production designer (laughs).

You mentioned how the industry struggles to sustain local talent. Evidently that’s becoming an issue amongst aspiring artists as more and more youth are opting to travel overseas to practise and/or study. What would you say to those thinking of doing so?

It would be wrong for me to say “do it”, but it would also be wrong for me to say “don’t do it”. I think everyone needs to take their own journey. Even in England, people wanted to go to Hollywood. In Indonesia there are those who want to film in China. Everyone wants to push further, further and further. I think it’s more of a question of what producers, the industry and maybe the government can do now to retain talents who may progress. How do you get them to come back? I think it’s more of a question for them than the directors themselves. Actually, they (the directors) should be pushing themselves to go as far as they can, and everyone else should be thinking "How can we bring our levels up to them?"

Sounds tricky.

It is tricky. The industry is tricky. They’re pumping out so many kids into the industry, but is there enough work? I see maybe 20% new faces, and the rest are people I’ve seen for years. Change is not going to be that fast.



Any last words of advice for aspiring local filmmakers?

I’d say that it’s important for students to expose themselves to as many environments as possible. I hate to say it, but here it can be quite a controlled environment. I was very fortunate, or unfortunate, when I was 16 or so. I would work in factories, in production lines. I would lay tarmac on roads while I was a student. Whenever I wasn’t at school, I was working. I would work with ex convicts when moving houses. Not only was it different factories, different houses, but different people as well. And actually in production design you have to remember –– “that house is dressed like this because of the person in it”. Everything comes back to the characters. They’re the King of their world. Every King has their tastes and therefore their world will be as such. So the more people you meet, the wider range of society you expose yourselves to.

Everyone may say “travel”. You can’t always afford that, but you can still see things. Just take a walk. When I first came to Singapore, all I used to do was ride buses around and learn the city like that. I wasn’t going on tours or anything like that, I was just sitting on Bus 16 riding all the way through the neighbourhood. Or I would take a train, all the way, East to West, the entire line, just to see what Clementi looks like, or Joo Koon. That will help.

The interview has been edited for clarity

Interview by Charlie Chua.

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Review: Toyol (2019)

June 22, 2019, 9:30 am
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The familiar Southeast Asian tale of the Toyol, gets a political twist in Toyol, Malaysian filmmaker Ho Yuhang's contribution to the HBO Folklore series, also screened at the Asian Film Archive's 'Fear of Monsters' series. Ho, not accustomed to horror, pitches his attempt at the genre from an angle of greater urgency to the Malaysian psyche - politicians and their dirty laundry.

A fishing town suffers a strange phenomenon of fish going belly up in its waters, putting its local mayor-like character in the hot seat. Desperate for solutions, he entertains even the bizzare, just to keep his small town electorate appeased. In a classic dig at the incompetencies of Malaysian bureaucracy and the world’s most famous missing airplane, the mayor summoned a bomoh to perform a highly delirious pantomime of chasing away the devil.

The political allegory does not end there. In fact, it was just getting started. Claiming to take a leaf out of Rosmah’s book, it takes the bomoh-mayor ‘partnership’ to the next level. The politician meets a strange but attractive lady who claims she can end the town’s fishing woes. Speaking with an air of cold surety, we all know she comes a huge price. Of course, desperate to stay in power, he gives her a try. She does not disappoint, though in the process her exorcist rituals, she spooked the daylights out of his henchmen with her punctuated disappearance and reappearance.

Halfway deep into the film, one might become more mentally invested in the power struggle than the supernatural. The film’s loose grip on spookiness is evident in the callous ways the Toyol is being introduced to the audience and the animation department’s ‘genre-bending’ sci-fi Toyol with its laser beam eyes was probably an unwise gamble. I rather it did not appear. Equally distracting were the use of a pair of midgets to embellish the sorcery behind the Toyol’s raison d'être. A touch with of Harry Potter added nothing to the world of Asian evil spirits, though it did have something in common with the theatrical bomoh.

Indeed the real meat of the film lies in with the Shaman’s sneaky ascent to the top of the first family. Beneath the black magic is an even darker person who schemes her way to the top breaking up a family and disempowering her vehicle of usurpation - the man she married. From the rather rural and shamanistic origins of the Toyol, Director Ho Yuhang has managed to spin it into a socially more complex tale that mirrors some of the more urgent evils happening within Malaysia’s highest politician echelons. At times, confused in its genre-direction, but mostly entertaining. Review by Jeremy Sing

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Review: Chanthaly (2012)

June 23, 2019, 6:30 pm
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Mattie Do’s Chanthaly (2012) opens with warm hues filling the screen: a young girl named Chanthaly, affectionately nicknamed as Chan, skips to her home, her father holding her hand, calling out for her mother. When she opens the door, her father tells her to turn around and close her eyes. We see dangling feet and a chair kicked to the side, then a knife and the tell-tale sight of rivulets of red streaming down a forearm. Amazingly enough, Chanthaly’s mother is still half-conscious, pleading with her father to allow Chanthaly to turn around as she wants to see her daughter’s face. 


The first few minutes of Chanthaly are arguably its best, where the premise is set for a childhood clouded by trauma, absence, and not knowing. The camera work is tight––conveying the sense of panic, mild chaos, and confusion when confronted with such a scene––without a score, all we have is ambient noise, dialogue, items being moved, footsteps. Grounded in reality, we find ourselves confronted with images of a telephone cord around the neck is kept in focus more than her mother’s face, a knife with fresh blood: though typical, the imagery works well here. 

Beyond that, if, like me, you’re looking for a horror film that commands that suspension of belief, I’d advise you to comply with Chanthaly’s father to “turn around and close your eyes” as the rest of the film simply fails to do justice to the initial first few minutes. By its midpoint, it’s shifted from what could have been a fairly decent horror film, to a film that was, for the most part, met more so with laughter than fear (thanks to overt product placements of Revlon and Namkhong Beer, in particular), when I sat in the Oldham Theatre during the Asian Film Archive’s latest programme of Asian horror films, State of Motion 2019: A Fear of Monsters, this past Wednesday.


The plot is straightforward enough, a now 22-year-old Chanthaly (played by Amphaiphun Phimmapuny) suffers from a hereditary heart condition. Living at home with her overprotective father (Douangmany Soliphanh), she has her own laundry business which she runs from home with the help of her cousin, Bee (Khouan Souliyabapha) from within the confines of her gated home. With little contact with the outside world, she’s often visited by her hopelessly enamoured childhood friend, Thong (Soukchinda Duangkhamchan). Coinciding with memories of the few moments she had with her mother and exacerbated by her medication’s hallucinatory side effects, Chanthaly begins to see what she believes to be her mother’s spirit as a ghostly apparition. Coupled with the usual tensions between father and daughter, audiences are pulled into a domestic drama of the unspoken maternal figure, with Chanthaly’s father arguing that her mother died in childbirth despite the scene that the film first opened with.


More of a psychological drama than a horror, Chanthaly plays upon the classic conundrum of symptoms of illness manifesting as the supernatural––when taken into the context of Laotian superstition, medicines as well as alcohol here seem to alter the extent to which the mind is open, vulnerable, and receptive to the netherworld. As Chanthaly’s childhood friend Thong explains, “the more attention you pay to the spirits, the more power they have” foreshadowing the events that take place towards the end of the film. In essence, what makes Chanthaly successful is its emphasis on the locally relevant––it takes little cues from Western horror tropes, but rather finds itself amid the themes and symbols often portrayed in Asian and more specifically, Southeast Asian horror cinema. From the female malevolent spirit donning a white dress with long black hair to superstitions surrounding spirit worship and the maintenance (or lack thereof) of their dwellings, Chanthaly touches upon all such elements. Without a score to drive the narrative and only the occasional ambient, droning tones during Chanthaly’s encounters with the ghost in her home, the film almost appears to borrow from the tradition recently popularised in more slow, meditative approaches to psychological dramas, reminding me of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010).


Nevertheless, it would be irresponsible to frame a discussion on Chanthaly without touching upon the context within which it was made. Noted for being the first film to be directed and written entirely within Laos and the first Laotian horror film to be directed by a woman, the film, in itself, is of importance as a cultural product. With no formal training in filmmaking and no prior experience in the slightest in directing, Chanthaly is Do’s first film––to have made a complete feature-length one, is certainly quite the feat. Beyond that, Laos is known for its fairly underdeveloped local film industry, historically limited to early propaganda films shot in the 70s and 80s. Do herself explained in an interview that the production of the film was contingent upon the approval of the country’s Department of Cinema, further highlighting the extent to which sociopolitical factors have largely determined the resulting product. In fact, Do herself admitted that the film may not necessarily align with the Western traditions of horror.

With that in mind, I certainly can’t fault the film for doing what it could. Beyond the veil of superstition and symbolism, Chanthaly is ultimately a film about a father and a daughter and all the things that can and cannot be spoken about between the two. 

** Note: If you've found your way here via Facebook, you'll know that as very kindly explained to me by the film's official Facebook page in the comments section of this review when it was shared, the child in the beginning wasn't actually Chanthaly. Again, part of the twist you read about, but sorry for the spoilers for those who've gotten here via other channels).

Chanthaly was screened as part of the Asian Film Archive’s ongoing film programme, State of Motion 2019: A Fear of Monsters. Made available by Do to the public domain, you can watch the film in full on YouTube.

Melissa Noelle Esguerra is a multifaceted writer who likes to explore all things pertaining to art, film, culture, and literature. She obtained her BA (Hons) in English Language & Literature with a minor in Linguistics from New York University. After having spent the last four years in New York City, she now resides in Singapore.


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Review: Pob (2018)

June 25, 2019, 10:09 am
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 Manop and Pob
“Don’t leave me behind!” is a feeling that makes me shove my books into my bag and cling onto my colleagues as we leave the office. I say this out of fear that I may run into something, but in Pob - Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s short in HBO’s Folklore series - running into something could just work out in a wonderful way. 

This is exactly what happens when Manop - a struggling journalist covering a murder, encounters Pob - a blood-thirsty ghost hiding from sunlight in a shed. From the start, we learn that Pob isn’t what we should fear here because he’s already weakened by the usual things like the sun and statues of Buddha. Instead, Pen-ek lets Pob whine to Manop, and us, about what’s scarier than spirits that can enter our homes and eat our organs. 


Quote by Pen-Ek from Q&A: “What if a person doesn’t recognise you as a ghost? There would be no reason to be scared.” 

What was supposed to be a normal night became a painful one for Pob. Instead of being greeted by a quick meal of a fresh American man, he was greeted by a “Hello there” and a beer. His drop in confidence in communicating as a ghost reduces Pob to a regular person in an American man’s home, unable to do or say anything because of a language barrier that haunts not just him, but many other Thai people.

Quote by Pen-Ek from Q&A: “Thai people are scared of Americans.” 

In a comedic twist, Pob winds up driving the man to the hospital, but being in the driver’s seat hits too close and we relive Pob’s pain with what caused his death - a taxi driver robbed at gunpoint, then shot for fun and left behind.


In the film’s only moment of colour, we watch red seep into human Pob’s pale blue uniformed back, and we get a glimpse of what may be a scary sight to Pen-Ek Ratanaruang - being left behind, be it as a human on the street or as a ghost to talk or scare or eat. 

Back in the shed, Manop suggests taking photos to publish Pob’s story, but talks about how it may be too absurd to work as an article. Pob is pissed - he did just spend all that time telling his sto ry, but it could also be because he doesn’t want to remain forgotten. With his story re-told, he turns into a memory, his image captured and shared on the internet forever. 

In exchange for publishing Pob’s story, Manop asks for lucky numbers, yet even that can’t solve his problems. He pays his mother’s medical bills in full, but can’t stop her health from declining. As she flatlines, Manop ask for another deal with Pob - that if Pob saves his mother from death, he’d let Pob feed on his organs. After all, without his mother, Manop would also be left behind.

We don’t know if Pob does as he’s asked. On one hand, he did thank Manop moments before for helping him move on, and advised the young man to do the same. On the other, who was he to deny a free meal? Perhaps Pen-ek uses Pob’s smiling reflection to tell his audience to look at ourselves, to take a moment to think of what we’ll do if we ever became Pob.

This film was recently screened at the Asian Film Archive Oldham Theatre under its 'Fear of Monsters' screening series.

Review by Priscilla Liew
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Joko Anwar: "Horror is the most honest genre."

June 28, 2019, 12:40 am
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Who do you call if you need some scares, some tears, and a whole lot of despair? Why, you get the current stalwart of Indonesian cinema, Joko Anwar of course. One of the most prolific filmmakers of the region, who is just as popular with the critics as he is with the box office, he is here in town for a very special screening of Folklore: A Mother's Love and a panel discussion as part of the Asian Film Archive's State of Motion slate of horror films.

SINdie catches up with Joko over some hot tea and talk genre, working with horror, and his favourite themes.

What is it about genre works that captivate you? 

I grew up with genre films in my childhood. When I was five, I regularly visited the film theatres in my hometown, Medan, and most of the time, the theatres only played genre films; and predominantly horror films at that—because of this, the original Satan’s Slaves was one of those movies that were deeply etched in my memory. Alongside horror, they also played Kung Fu, action…these were the three genres that really influenced me. I grew wanting to be a filmmaker so that I can eventually make these kind of films. 

I actually wrote the screenplay for my first film, when I was in college. When Nia Dinata first asked me to write a screenplay that she was going to produce, I gave her the script that I finished—which was the romantic comedy, Janji Joni. This is why even though I wanted to be a horror filmmaker, the romantic comedy was the film that got made first.



What do you think of the horror genre in the context of Indonesia?

For me, horror is the most honest genre. When a horror film is made, the filmmaker is fixated on giving that cinematic experience of fear to the audience. I think these feelings are very universal, unlike a genre like drama, for which your feelings and responses while watching can depend a lot on factors such as your social status and your level of education. Someone can be intellectually amused when watching drama, but there are no such detached equivalents for horror—you cannot be ‘intellectually frightened’! It is a primal sensation, working in a genre and space where everybody feels the same way about certain things; and since it is so accessible to society, it is the perfect way to infuse anything you want as a filmmaker.

In Satan’s Slaves, I wanted to say something about the rising religiosity in Indonesia, which has reached a stage where if a religious teacher says something, people will just blindly follow. This is part of the reason why I killed the religious teacher in the film. By doing this, I was trying to make a point that there will not be much hope for you if you depend too much on religion. Once he dies, you are all by yourself. Your prayers will not help you—nothing will, except your love for  your family.


Satan's Slaves

One thing that strikes me is how prolific you are. How do you do it?

How do I do it? I am the sort of filmmaker who plans everything. I make shot lists before I shoot, and I communicate this to my crew, so that everybody will be on the same page. The process is different when I am working with the cast—I want them to be fresh on set, and sometimes I will give them something completely surprising to get fresh performances out of them.

Apart from that, I do not really know—maybe it is because I am an early riser? I always wake up at six in the morning to start working on scripts, sometimes even those that have no plans to be produced yet. I have actually only directed 8 films, but I have also written scripts for various features, amongst other projects I am involved in. I used to have about 11 un-produced scripts then, now people are starting to buy my whole scripts.

What’s the creative process of screenwriting for you like?

I have a script which I took eight years to complete. I also have a script that was completed in two weeks. Basically, I do not see one single way that is guaranteed to make the script more polished. Usually, if I do not like a script that I have started, I will just delete everything. This is why I make sure that the first draft is the perfect draft—I do not really do a lot of revisions. The last two movies that I did…. one was shot on the first draft and the other was shot on the second draft.

I believe you have to be very clear about what you need to tell. Not everything is about style or spectacle; you have to take care of your characters firsts. When you take care of the characters, interesting things will come to the surface. 

 Do you think being a critic has sharpened or changed the way you look at cinema and your own filmmaking practice?

It helped in a way. When I was still a film critic, I actually try not to be critical whenever I watch a film, I try to be an audience first. It is only after watching that I begin to think about what worked and what did not. When watching a film, I try not to analyse it. By making an assessment of a film only after you watch it in its entirety, one realises what worked the in storytelling in terms of both the techniques and the aesthetics.

Perhaps it is because of this greater awareness that I would be actively thinking of what story I want to tell within a shot, within a scene, whenever I am making a film. Next, one begins to think of the kind of tools that one needs, and one reflects and makes the decision if one has the technical skills or aesthetic sense to do it.

After finishing a film, it always helps if someone is critiquing it, no matter if it is a positive or a negative review. I know that this is not something that can be internalised easily, but one has to process it. Praises can be dangerous because then you start thinking that you are good, but a harsh critic can also really get you down. Personally, I only allow myself to feel sad for maybe one day. After that, you have to be the hardest critic for yourself. 

Every step of the filmmaking process, I always have to look at the components of my film, and whether they work. I have to be able to judge my film, as if it is not me doing it.

How did you get involved in the Folklore project, and what was the development process for you like?

I have actually worked on a project with Eric Khoo before—it was a short film omnibus titled Art Through Our Eyes, and we collaborated with other filmmakers in the region. Later on, he invited me to come aboard this new project of his, and I accepted.  The development was actually pretty organic—Eric just said that we are going to make an anthology of stories about ghosts in our countries and we can pick any ghost we want, and I picked the Wewe.


Can you share more about the Wewe and why you chose her?

The theme of motherhood and fertility has been present persistently in my films, so much so that one trademark of my work could be the presence of a pregnant woman: My first pregnant character went into labour in a taxi, the second one was ran over by a bus, the third one was got an abortion and sealed the child’s remains inside a statue…even Satan’s Slaves was about someone who was infertile and had to ask for help from the Devil to bear children.


I think this fascination with maternity came from a very deep place in my memory. As a child, I always question why I was born. After I grew up, I always ask people why they want to have children—I mean, this world we have right now is a very dangerous place to grow up in, and unless you have a very strong plan on how to raise your kids, I do not think anyone should have them.

It is with this idea of someone who cannot bear children, someone who has a child but did not have any intention to it, and the feelings of a child not being loved by their parents in mind that the Wewe, a female spirit borne of a barren woman’s sorrows, came automatically and organically.

Interview by Alfonse Chiu
Interview transcribed by Jeremy Sing
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Review: Bangla (2018)

July 1, 2019, 9:09 am
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Winner of the National Youth Film Awards (NYFA) 2018 and the only Singaporean entry to be selected for the Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia (SSFF & Asia) 2019, Bangla by Idette Chen casts a new, intimate light on the local-foreigner relationship within Singapore. Bangla revolves around Savi (Tahir Ansari), a migrant worker from Bangladeshi, whose injury forces him to moonlight at a hawker-center store owned by lone hawker Aunty (Lesley Ong), in order to continue sending money to his family back home. 

The film’s commendable cinematography and production design help to breathe new perspective onto the quotidian. Through an impressive long shot of the ordinary living quarters of a construction site, the pale blue hue of the morning sky neatly blends into the purplish metal rungs of the building, giving the building an imposing, almost ominous glow. Audiences also peek into the claustrophobic interior of this building, where Savi lives and sleeps on a tiny bed cluttered with belongings. All this serves to accentuate the degree of isolation and desperation that Savi faces when his injury introduces hardship later on. 


This ties in with the keen sense of loneliness that persists for both Savi and Aunty, with both being separated from their families: Savi’s family is in Bangladeshi, while Aunty is revealed to be a widow whose only daughter is pursuing a job opportunity abroad. Just as both characters begin to bond over their respective familial situations, Savi is abruptly deported back to Bangladeshi. 

The film, however, refuses to end on a bitter note. The last few scenes comprise of close shots that alternate between both characters as Savi leaves his quarters. The angled close shots bridge the spatial distance between Savi and Aunty by creating the impression that Aunty is in full-view of seeing Savi leave for good. Yet, rather than just dejection, both characters’ facial expressions seem to hint of gratitude, perhaps for having the chance to have met each other. 

Bangla thus serves as a sentimental ode to familial love and longing, reminding us that these universal concepts transcend communal barriers and that individuals from communities that are seemingly worlds-apart are often more similar than we think. 

We caught up with director and producer of Bangla Idette Chen to trace her experience making this short film in our interview with her.

Do you think slavery exists in Singapore? 

Not as it's traditionally known, but I think slavery exists in the form of mistreatment to the workers where they are denied basic rights and entitlement. 


Apart from the normal film audience, have you screened this to certain social groups? e.g. construction workers, heartland aunties and uncles who might have a more special reaction to the film? 

The film is currently still in submission to film festivals but we hope to be able to screen this to the migrant community and perhaps even in the heartlands, at hawker centres. 

How did you find your lead actor? He seems like a real construction worker and what were the challenges in getting him involved in this film? 

Casting was a challenge we had. We played with the idea of getting a real migrant worker who has a natural talent to act. It could have been a great asset to the film to paint the most authentic picture of migrant workers with their accent and behaviours, however due to practical reasons like language barrier and constraints in schedules, we were unable to do that. 

We found Tahir on an actors database after a long search through cultural clubs and drama groups. He stood out the most with his sturdy physique and deep-set eyes that fitted the foreign look. During the audition, his attempt at a foreign accent was pretty convincing yet not too much at the same time. His performance was of utmost importance to me because he is the very subject of our film. If he were unable to pull off acting as a migrant worker, if he were unbelievable, the film would have been an utter failure. 


The way Tahir spoke was a big element. During the film's preparation and research, I realised the migrant workers I came across did not have a recognizable accent and they spoke differently from one another. With that, I decided to break the English language, and have Tahir create his own foreign accent using broken speech instead of faking a specific accent which could turn out to be unconvincing if not done well. I gave special importance to his accent and ensured that he sounded foreign no matter the choice of words, by slurring, mumbling, or enunciating certain vowels. Tahir also had the help of his father who works with migrant workers to break the lines and teach him the way certain words are pronounced. Many have asked if Tahir was indeed a migrant worker. Tahir has great potential and had put in a lot of hard work to make Savi his own, and I am proud of who Savi is and how he came to life. 


The dialogue seemed very natural, were the actors improvising? 

The dialogues were crafted with a lot of thought. Especially for Savi, because his dialogues were in broken English, my writers and I revisited the dialogue with numerous rounds of script revision to ensure that the lines did not sound unintelligent. Of course, there was also some improvisation from the actors during production, and we worked to ensure the best for everyone. 

The film seemed a highly controlled effort. Were there any interesting takes or scenes that didn't make the final cut? 

We had a scene before Ang offered to hire Savi where she was frying nuggets in a quiet afternoon, when she accidentally dropped the whole tray. Savi then appeared miraculously like a hero to save a damsel in distress. This scene held one of the highest number of takes and we even had a reshoot to perfect it. There was also a scene where Savi's injury had a relapse at the hawker stall and he hid it from Ang. Sadly, both were removed in the final edit for more efficient storytelling. 

Review by Bryson Ng


Bryson is a sophomore student from Yale-NUS college majoring in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). His special interests include film theory and studying the socio-political intersections between film and culture.
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Review: A Mother's Love (2018)

July 2, 2019, 8:04 am
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A Woman, A Mother and A Ghost - for the female in an Asian Horror flick, these are necessary revision, the foundation of stories exchanged on bus rides home, and the thought that plagues us later when we stare at our mothers’ backs wondering if she’d turn around as someone we don’t know. Every time these thoughts revisit, my mother is quick to scare me, but quicker to draw a cross on my forehead to remind me that it’s really her, here to protect me.  




To Joko Anwar, ‘A Mother’s Love’ translates the Mother into something scarier, but also stronger. The actions of Murni - the young mom within the film, are the very actions of Joko’s own mother, like the moment Murni ruins the home she’s evicted from by throwing faeces on its walls. It’s easy to mom-shame Murni for that, but we later see how much more she is willing to fight and struggle if it means being with her son rather than letting go of him for an easier life. 

“So you cannot pinpoint whether she’s a bad person or a good person. But one thing’s for sure, a mother’s love for her children is pure.” - Joko Anwar, on thinking of Murni as a mother.

And when this pure love bleeds harder and fiercer, it becomes the Wewe - a spirit desperate to be a mother. She plagues the dreams of children whenever their mothers threaten to let the Wewe take them away for misbehaving. In the film, Murni discovers the spirit’s army of kidnapped children in the attic of the house she was cleaning. The discovery becomes national news, with scenes of the children being rescued replaying on the TV. But for taking the Wewe’s children away, Murni becomes the target. 







The usual scary things start happening in their home - nightmares, scary sightings, the TV switching itself on, and the Wewe showing herself in the TV’s reflection. The jump scares frighten for a while, but go on for a bit too long. But each scare works to plant fear in Murni, that her Jodi might be taken away from her. We now see that the Wewe also plagues the dreams of mothers, threatening to take their child away for not loving them right. Finally, the audience is let in on something important - Jodi might not actually be real. 



The film took its time to go from a hinted ‘Who are you talking to?’ moment to Murni’s full-on meltdown where she thought she recorded Jodi throwing dirt at her laundry, then saw that it was herself in the video, evicting herself from her own illusion. She runs to seek help at an asylum, unsure about what to do with what she had just realised/recalled - that she lost Jodi and her husband years ago in a car crash.







From the sunlit corner in the asylum, Marissa Anita’s performance as a heartbroken mother is incredibly moving. Her solitude and the slump in her show us that Murni is truly broken from being forced back into the truth of her son. But Murni’s brief exchange with a paranormal expert puts fight back in her - the same fight we saw at the start when Murni and her child were being evicted - as the expert makes Murni realise that shattering her illusion of Jodi was the Wewe’s way of taking her child away from her. She leaves the asylum and runs back danger, back to the attic where the Wewe kept her kids. And there Jodi was, back in her sight, but unsure if he wanted to be back into her arms. 

Murni calls out to her son, her voice carrying so much desperation that any fear would’ve given way. As Jodi runs back into his mother’s arms, the collective relief in the cinema was apparent, but so was the puzzlement at how the story was resolved - the Wewe embracing both mother and son. 

As the lights came on, I initially wished that the ghost was dealt with in another manner - dissolving or dying or just disappearing. But during the Q&A, Joko Anwar painted a clearer picture about the mother’s love that he wanted to explore, allowing a slow, personal realisation
on my part.

The Wewe was borne out of a yearning to be a mother, a love for a child and a family. For her to disappear as an end would be easy, but perhaps in deliberately showing the Wewe embracing mother and son, Joko Anwar also addresses how this love is not exclusive. Because it is a pure emotion, this purity does not stop at humans, but lives with anyone and anything that experiences a mother’s love.
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Review: Furie (2019)

July 5, 2019, 2:31 am
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Le-Van Kiet’s newest crime thriller Furie closed out Udine Far East Film Festival 2019, and follows a well trod kidnapped child and vengeful parent with a special set of skills plot design. Fortunately, the uniqueness of the Vietnamese setting and it’s extremely watchable lead, performed by superstar Veronica Ngo makes the film just fresh enough for blood thirsty fans of the genre. 

The story develops with Hai Phuong (Ngo), a debt collector working on behalf of a loan shark to support herself and her daughter. Her position as a tough fighter combined with the mysterious circumstance of being a single mother ostracises herself and her daughter, Mai (Cat Vi) from this small community. 




Following beat by beat in the same mould as many other films like this, she then encounters someone who kidnaps Mai and to get her back she has to go through a journey into her difficult and mysterious past, and for genre fans, a whole lot of close quarter fisticuffs and a dose of knife-gun-fu. 

Furie does on ocassion try to break some of its familiar tropes, with a strong lean towards women. The main character’s main obstacles and relationships are with other women. Her biggest confrontation comes from an equally focused Thanh Soi, played excellently by Thanh Hoa. Putting these two actors in the same frame was sometimes as explosive as some of the action. The men then becomes sidelined into supporting roles and is a refreshing and clear point of view that sometimes gets lost in other films cut from the same cloth. 

The tired material does eventually become cumbersome and does detract from something potentially interesting moving forward, but the biggest culprit that weighs this piece down is the achingly corny groan inducing ending that does slightly weaken the cinematic attempts preceding it. 



Furie has a some technical polish and a lot of bravado in its designs. The film tries to outdo its budget and feels electric. Its' set pieces seem to be edgy and pushing the film into unexpected territories. There are times when the action does seem somewhat protracted and over the top, but there is a giddy enthusiasm in the action, thanks to stunt coordinator Keri Abrikh, whose worked on films such as Jason Bourne and similar sounding film, Fury. The film borrows much from American films flowing very much between its original perspective, loving homage and meta-commentary on some occasion. 



But how does it compare to Southeast Asian works? Whilst not as accomplished as some of this regions action films, such as Gareth Evans gold standard for The Raid series, the film falls very much in place with an influx of new works such as Philippines Buy Bust, and We Will Not Die Tonight which too featured a female centric view in the form of leading characters played by Anne Curtis and Erich Gonzales. That being said, the film holds its own with its very own Tiger Mom. 

Furie is now playing on Netflix. It recently had its European premiere, as the closing film of the Udine Far East Film Festival 2019 following its international bow at the Osaka Asian Film Festival, as part of its International Competition programming. 

Review by Rifyal Giffari

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Piece of cake? No, meat! Talking animation with Jerrold Chong and JX Huang

July 5, 2019, 10:01 am
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A lamb cutlet works herself to the bone to support herself, supporting her younger brother and her sickly mother in a world where the odds are stacked up against them. Her teenage brother, a durian, is a social outcast with failing grades, while her mother’s health is rapidly deteriorating. Longing for individual liberty, the lamb cutlet is trapped by her socio-economic limitations – a vicious cycle which seems far too difficult to overcome. 

This sums up A Piece of Meat, written by Eric Khoo and, brought to life in the form of animation by Jerrold Chong and Huang Junxiang (JX). So allegories aside, we are looking at a literal walking piece of meat in this short film. In fact, the idea for this short was the precursor to Eric's Mee Pok Man. We guess Eric had more of an appetite for mee pok than lamb chops in the 90s. But that piece (of meat) was finally served as an entrée earlier in May at Directors’ Fortnight or Quinzaine des Realisateurs, an independent section held in parallel to the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. This 11-minute short also competed at the 2019 Annecy Animation Festival in June. 


Eric Khoo, Jerrold Chong and Huang Junxiang

SINdie spoke to the two animators behind A Piece of Meat, Jerrold Chong and Huang Junxiang, for a tasty scoop behind the scenes. For those who do not know them, Jerrold, a BFA graduate in Animation at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) has had his films screened at numerous international film festivals, including Annecy International Animated Film Festival, Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF), Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival and he is currently developing his first feature, “The Art of Charlie Chan”, based on an Eisner awarded Singaporean Graphic Novel by Sonny Liew.  Huang Junxiang has made short films have screened at the Very Short International Festival and the Singapore International Film Festival and he has produced a number of feature films including In The Room, Apprentice, Ramen Teh and Buffalo Boys. 

How did you first get involved with this project?


JX: We were sitting down and talking with Eric and he mentioned this idea he had 30 years and go and asked if we could work on it… so we did!



Jerrold: I still remember the first time Eric shared with me a photocopy of storyboards he did 30 years ago, and I was fully intrigued by the narrative and concept. Eric had originally envisioned it as an animated film, and looking at the storyboard drawings, I proposed executing it in a cutout stop-motion visual approach which he loved and that’s how everything started! 


How was the audience reception in Cannes; was it surprising?

JX: It was heartening to see a foreign audience appreciate a short film that is pretty specifically local, and that also takes a jab at the Cannes audience too!


Jerrold: I saw the film’s screening at Annecy International Animation Festival, and I’m happy that it got quite bit of laughs and the reception to the film was good. A lot of the jokes were quite local in context and it was indeed surprising to see it translates well to a foreign audience.

What was the hardest part of making Piece of Meat?



JX: Time, we both had full time jobs.


Jerrold: For me, the most challenging was experimenting and getting used to the new cutout approach to creating scenes and sets using limitations we set for ourselves (ie. found photographs and images from Google, magazine, etc, use of multi-plane setup, and creating everything “in-camera” without any use of VFX). It was a style that we have not tried before (especially for a narrative-based film), and therefore the first few scenes took much longer time to plan and execute as we were going by trial-and-error, making mistakes and finding new solutions. 
In addition to this, we went into production without a complete animatic, which is atypical of narrative animated films. Therefore, right from the beginning, we did not have the full complete picture of what the film would be. But this gave us more freedom to sculpt and add new scenes as we went along with production and found new ideas and new approaches (ie. music, etc) that we wouldn’t have thought of/planned at the beginning.

How was the experience co-directing the film?



JX: Very smooth, we both like the same ideas and themes in stories.


Jerrold: My partnership with JX has been very fruitful and eye-opening. There is always a constant exchange of ideas and we both sometimes see the film in different ways and I think that really benefited the development of the film. Its also a good blend of sensibilities, as JX is more of a comedy-kind of filmmaker, while I tend to see things in a darker, more serious but a bit surreal side. And that blend has translated itself into the film. Working with someone new also helps me to break out of my usual tendencies and see things from a new perspective, and that has made me a better filmmaker.



Where is the film heading to next?



JX: After Cannes and Annecy, it will be heading to Switzerland, then Portugal. It would be nice to have it screen at a festival in Asia and hopefully at our own SGIFF!

Jerrold, how was the experience co-writing the film with Eric Khoo?

I have obviously been a big fan of Eric Khoo’s films and his role in Singapore cinema, and was very excited to have the chance to collaborate with him on this. When I was passed the original storyboards, he was very open and gave me lots of freedom to see what I can do with it (the story). The central narrative of a Lamb Chop struggling to survive in a world of objects was already such an enticing and strong story, and I tried to adapt it into a more contemporary context and add some new characters and scenes to further explore the themes of oppression and class struggles that I saw in the original storyboards. And throughout this process, Eric has been very supportive and was a great sounding board for these newer ideas.

Jerrold, as someone who has worked with adapting short stories to the screen before, how did you find a balance between your own voice and the source material?

In my (limited) experience, I think the most important seed is the emotions and thoughts that I immediately feel upon reading/coming into contact with the source material. That is something that becomes the compass for what the film will become, as that’s what you want to translate and communicate to the viewers. After a while, I think it’s helpful to put aside and forget the source material, and focus on how to make those same emotions and themes into a stronger, visual form. I also try to make use of my own personal experiences to find a personal connection with the themes of the source material and that helps me to feel more honest and certain in any adaptation or changes made to the original material.



In addition, with animation, one can really push the boundaries of how abstract, whimsical or surreal a story can be told, and I wanted to take advantage of the medium’s unique potential to push the ideas of the source material as far as possible, to be as imaginative and as surprising as it can be.


JX, how was the experience producing this film?


Different, because its so spread out especially for a short film, but it gives you the time to shape the work over an extended period, as opposed to making snap decisions during the shoot period where sometimes you are limited by circumstance.

Interview by Alfonse Chiu

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Review: Medium Rare (1991)

July 15, 2019, 7:40 am
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The Toa Payoh ritual murders had been a harrowing episode in the history of Singapore.


That year, when news broke that a nine-year-old girl’s naked and assaulted body had been found at a lift landing, parents everywhere were seized by indomitable panic. Fears intensified with the discovery of another body two weeks later, this time a 10-year-old boy. The thought of an unseen serial child murderer lurking dark corners in the country was so horrifying, it left an indelible mark on the collective consciousness of those who were caring for young ones at the time.


In a bizarre twist, it was later revealed that the children whose lives had been snuffed out too early were only the epilogue to what was a most gripping backstory. Adrian Lim, charlatan medium and sex-obsessed conman mastermind, had been accused of rape by one of his former clients/victims/“holy” wives. (The slashes are bounteous because Lim himself was never one to respect boundaries; he’d used his spiritual “practice” to trick women into sleeping with him.) Furious at how the police failed to recognise that he had been “framed”, he convened a meeting with his two “holy” wives (the quotation marks seem to be copious too huh) and there, it was decided: children were to be offered as a sacrifice to Kali, the Hindu goddess of time, creation and destruction, to liberate Lim from his shackles of maligned wrongdoing.




Not only is the irony spectacularly unmissable, I also cannot describe the relationship between Lim and the two women who helped prop up his sham of a business without opening seven more cans of worms. Let it simply be known that the case was so sensational, it continued to receive media coverage and send shivers down people’s spines for years afterwards.


Because it’s always tempting to want to reimagine the most enthralling stories we know onscreen, it’s no surprise that this particular story generated plenty of adaptation interest amongst filmmakers. One such attempt, Medium Rare (1991), was recently screened at the Asian Film Archive’s State of Motion 2019: A Fear of Monsters film programme. I went in without preexisting expectations – no, scratch that. I went in having done my research on the film’s critical reception (poor) and loosened my expectations for it (extremely low), but still the only thing the film accomplished was living up to its half-baked reputation.


They often say that truth is stranger than fiction. In the case of Medium Rare, it is simply that the truth was far more coherent than its fictional counterpart. The film begins with a young Australian (photo)journalist, Beverly Watson, clearly fascinated with the idea of spiritual mediums in Singapore. Snap, snap, snap. She’s here, we later learn, to break a story about the mystic underbelly of our cosmopolitan island city-state. Well, here’s the real scoop for ya Miss Watson: cities are complex ethnological and geographical spaces that can encompass a great many dimensions. It would be sorely remiss if a place – howsoever defined – were to be strictly what it marketed itself to be. Is Sydney just its Opera House? Or Gold Coast Sea World? In fact, doesn’t it sound extremely nonsensical now that I’ve mapped it back onto your country for you? Cha-ching.


This is not a critique of Australians, in case you missed the point. It is a critique of how feeble the quality of writing, character development and overall story is in Medium Rare.


The film completely misses the point of what made the trial so gripping in its time; in fact, it is at best just a C-grade imitation of actual events. It does not stop to interrogate intention or relationships, content simply to thrive off the Orientalist exoticisation of everything that can be dog-eared as aspects of the Singaporean identity. For instance, Adrian Lim’s acts made people’s skin crawl because of how they had all been committed in his house, a run-of-the-mill HDB flat. HDB flats are synecdochal of what we configure as home here in Singapore; that its banality can be so compromised is what hikes his crimes up a notch on the creepy barometer.


But in Medium Rare, Daniel Lee’s crimes are all couched in a kind of semi-literal whitewashed prestige: a two-storey colonial-style bungalow, a lushly carpeted stairway and walls so pristine they could give Santorini’s blue domed churches a run for their money. The writers even took the liberty to name his not-so-humble abode an ashram. Last I heard, not a single Singaporean has misappropriated Indian cultural nomenclature for their homes.




The shock value generated by Adrian Lim's story lies in the savage incongruity between what he seemed to be and what he really was. The average Singaporean is our next-door neighbour, Chinese, male, cut stockily – boxes that he checks. The average Singaporean is, however, not a child murderer with a phony job and two women to exploit for sexual degeneracy, all of which are boxes Adrian Lim also checks. By completely eliminating the aberration that is at the heart of this case and, instead, elevating Lee to that of a god-like status whose “abilities” the film sometimes appears to legitimise for no good reason at all, Medium Rare instantly becomes burlesque.


I digress. Let me return to the plot.


As you can infer by now, Watson is the device through which we navigate the film – well, at first anyway. As soon as we meet Lee, a vague Pan-Asian reincarnation of Adrian Lim, the camera is happy to dispense with Watson’s existence. Then, not unlike our closest hare-brained friend who cannot recount a funny anecdote without straying into tangential asides, the camera enters this incomprehensible trance in which it wildly ricochets amongst characters and settings. It just can’t quite decide where to be or what to show us.


Just think about it. Three times we are invited to watch an insipid verbal tug-of-war play out between Watson, who desperately wants to break the story she is spinning in her head, and her editor, who wants to put her on the next flight to Beijing. But not once does the film think it their responsibility to tell us what the relationship between Yoke Lin and Lee is – and I don’t just mean that I can’t tell if Yoke Lin, last name unknown, should have complained to the Ministry of Manpower for her unpaid ashram receptionist work in exchange for being a live-in, uh, partner. I mean, how did they meet? Why her subservience to Lee despite his prevailing disinterest in her other than when she’s prostrate on his bed? (No, you don’t get it: he literally doesn’t talk to her.) How are they even related at all?




As the film progresses, the questions gradually snowball in quantity and intensity and eventually someone in the theatre will bark out in laughter. Take note of when this happens, fellas. This is the point at which the illusion crumbles and Medium Rare's ridiculous storyline can no longer be tolerated with anything other than jest.


I could go on to pan its careless mishandling of women and issues of abusive relationships; its transparent, targeted marketing of Singapore (that would put Crazy Rich Asians to shame); its flagrant transgressions of journalistic integrity; the vacant acting and clumsy editing; and above all, the corruption of what could have been an excellent story to retell if only the writers had not been so caught up with inserting their own fantasies into the film. I honestly could. But as I left the theatre, rather than being boiled over with incredulity at the dishonest reinterpretation, I was far more overcome with piteousness at how much of its own potential Medium Rare had cannibalised.


Today, Medium Rare is mostly remembered for its revival of the local film industry. I’d wager that it wasn’t so much economic as it was aesthetic, as in: “Anyone could make a better movie than that!” Regardless, it awakened an industry that had gone somewhat quiet since the 1970s and marked a turnaround in Singaporean cinema.


Yet, the fact that that's all we can give Medium Rare credit for is a terrible shame. There were moments when, watching the film, you catch glimpses of how it could have been so much more. It delivered some really enrapturing shots and could have become a gorgeous time capsule of Singapore in the nineties, the way Royston Tan’s 15 is now canonical for the teenage mafia era of our country. It could have been pioneering in ways that do not reduce its significance to that of what it did, rather than what it was. It could have recreated atmosphere, addressed complexity, explored perspective, questioned audiences, imagined better and risen above itself. It could have been all of those and more, and I wanted so much to give this 28-year-old film an opportunity to prove itself to someone who does not even have firsthand experience of the original Toa Payoh ritual murders.


Well, too bad all Medium Rare did was simply leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Review by Eisabess Chee

Eisabess is based in Singapore but her heart is always already in another universe, preferably fictional. Will write for films and food.

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