SINdie

I’ve always had an obsession with horror, there is something fascinating about the genre that draws me in. Maybe it is something to do with the taboo concepts the genre often dabbles in, about grotesque figures and distorted mental states drawn and visualized, or about the unknown that lures and allure us human beings, both in our audience seats and on the silver screen. Horror movies are still pumping from the big American machine; adapted, remade, rebooted, made into sequels, prequels, spin-offs. Clearly, there is recognition of the demand, perhaps it is not just me, perhaps we all have an innate interest in the horrific, the twisted, the macabre moods and things, maybe we are all in search of a good scare or two.

Great horror cinema pushes beyond superficial scares and frightening scenes. They force us to look at the dark potentials within ourselves and ask questions. Mattie Do’s The Long Walk was a surprise. The early beginnings of the film were never obvious about the horrific possibilities that would occur. An unnamed old man (played by Chansamone Inoudom) spends his days salvaging and selling old technologies, watched by the spirit of a woman. Though he may have a futuristic display embed somewhere in his forearm, it seems that the world has long left him and his village behind. Futuristic flying machines cut the air above, characters talk about the unseen technological marvels inserted into their flesh, they talk about a big futuristic city completely different from the rural boonies that director Mattie Do has decided to set her film in. We are years into the future, yet the village is still stuck years behind.

Image result for the long walk mattie do

Still, this unnamed old man seems to feel somewhat at ease here, he is fine with living in the village, fine with his old house, fine with his outdated technologies. He seems a pleasant old man who likes his vape quite a bit, but eventually his unhealthy obsession with easing the pain of the living, with death; we are given privy to, he is not as harmless as he seems. Do’s story intertwines the past with present, present with past, concurrently telling the story of the old man’s present days and his youth. Of he, as a young boy (Played by Por Silatsa) discovering how fragile mortality is; struggling to come to terms with the inevitable death of his sickly mother, and discovering a dying woman turned spirit amongst the greens of the forest. It eventually becomes clear that the woman has been accompanying the boy till his old age in the present day.

The Long Walk is not an easy film to summarise. It’s mesh of genres is surely both peculiar and assured. Horror, fantasy, science fiction, drama; set in both present and past; where the humans feel more sinister than the ghosts featured. But one thing is for sure - it is great horror.

Everything begins to spiral when the old man discovers that with the help of his ghostly companion, he is able to travel into his past and influence his childhood self’s decisions. A journey of no return begins. He would have to face the consequences of everything he has done thus far, and come face to face with the darkest possibilities of his humanity.

Director Mattie Do is a distinguished figure of Laos cinema and has been a regular patron of the horror genre; her 2016 film Dearest Sister, a critical success, and Lao's first ever entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards. Her latest film, The Long Walk premiered at the 2019 Venice Film Festival under the 'Venice Days’ section. She has recently taken the time to answer a few questions about the production of the film.

Sindie: What was the process of finding funding for the film like? Considering the unique mixture of genres, was The Long Walk a difficult pitch to potential backers?

Mattie: We actually had difficulty finding the funding for The Long Walk initially, as it is a mix of genres and strongly arthouse. The pitch itself was difficult not necessarily for backers, but in general. It's quite difficult to encapsulate the story as a whole in a brief or summarized way! Imagine having only 5-10 minutes to pitch the film! We first pitched this film at SAFF in Singapore, where Aurora Media showed interest in the film and joined with us. Eventually, at Focus Asia in Udine, Aurora decided to take a majority producer role and bring on other partners to fund the film in its entirety. So while it was a while for us to find the funding, when it was time for the film to come together, the agreements all happened quite quickly!

Was there any pressure following up Dearest Sister after it's critical acclaim, and submission as Lao's first foreign-language film submission to the academy awards?

I could feel a lot of pressure from both the audience expectation side as well as from within my own team to make a film that would meet or exceed Dearest Sister. Honestly, there were days I was quite depressed by this because the entire process of making this film in and of itself was very arduous and filled with unexpected challenges and disappointments. Because of those challenges, I really felt no expectations for where the film would go next. I was just happy that I got to make a unique film and somehow I survived and was so close to completing it. All I cared about was that it would get seen somewhere and have its own audience that loved it and appreciated it, otherwise, I just was so tired and exhausted and didn't want to think about the big festivals and the Academy. Imagine my surprise when I found out the film was accepted to Venice, Toronto, and Busan! As for the Academy, I hope that someday I will have the chance to submit again, but really that isn't up to me as submissions are by invitation from the Lao committee.

What attracted you to this story? How was the writing process for the film like?

The film is a deeply personal story for me about the loss of my mother and my dog. But, it's also a story which I wanted to make to defy expectations of what the occidental world assumes is a Southeast Asian film, and what defines Southeast Asian film. I really get tired of going to various festivals and seeing what is categorized as "authentic" Southeast Asian and how that categorization doesn't leave room for much else. I had some random person comment that they thought Dearest Sister wasn't an authentic film because it didn't portray poor village people in rural Laos... well here you go. I made a film about people in an impoverished village in rural Laos, with time-traveling, ghosts, science fiction, and murder. Boom. Southeast Asia.

The writing process was fun, but difficult as getting to the point where everything clicks into place through these slow releases of detail is extremely tough. Everything really has to work and come together in a film like this! One also has to have a lot of faith in the audience to stay with the film from the beginning all the way to the end to reap that reward. My husband is my writer, and when I threw this vague idea of him about an elderly man walking up and down the long, dirt road with his ghostly companion from the past... it all just spiraled into this eventually. It took a while though. There were many editions and drafts, and for my writer, he's the kind of person who overhauls each draft completely so that they're almost unrecognizable from the previous draft. In the end, everything actually came together to form this film that I feel so fortunate to have shot and finished somehow!

Did you face any difficulties or challenges during the shooting of the film? Were there any moments of spontaneity on the set that made it into the film?

I like to joke that this entire film is an allegory for how difficult and challenging the shoot was. We actually even had a bit of a time loop. Five days into production, we parted ways with our director of photography over creative differences. It was problematic because he'd also brought the camera package, and the grip and electric. I had five days of footage that I didn't particul arly like, a dozen people from overseas in a local guesthouse, and I had my special effects makeup artist booked to arrive in three weeks for the most expensive shots of the film. Luckily, my producers were able to find and hire a new cinematographer, purchase a camera package (rentals are almost impossible here) and reconfigure the budget to let me reshoot those five days without adding to the budget. But it was tense. My new DP (Hey, Matthew Macar!) showed up three days before we started shooting, he'd just come off a commercial shoot and a trans-Pacific flight, and with like only basic prep we just jumped in. But I definitely think that added some spontaneity to everything, although more out of necessity than anything. The film had to go on, and it did! We started again on day one and just went for it!

During the scripting process, was it a particular challenge to strike a balance between the mythical elements (ghosts, time travel, etc) and the science fiction elements in the film? Was it a conscious and intentional choice to incorporate contrasting genres?

I don't think it was a huge challenge. A major part of the commentary held within the film is that no matter how rapid development and technology changes may be, and how quickly they hit, there are certain things that remain unchanging not only about Laos as a country, but us and human nature regardless of place or time. The most intentional part of this was to start the film off without an identifiable timeline, and allow the audience to make the assumption that they were watching a period film that was set in the past or the very poor present, then defy that by introducing the futuristic elements. The reason why things are so rustic and entropic is to really instill that point, that we could have bodily augmentations, we could be rid of combustion engines, we could have prefab food in every corner of the world, but we still have deep regrets and we still suffer loss, and we still wish we could fix our mistakes and turn back time.

The Long Walk premiered at the 2019 Venice Film Festival under the 'Venice Days’ section and has been screened at the 2019 Busan Film Festival as well as the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival under the 'Contemporary World Cinema' section.

Interview by Timothy Ong

Some years ago, Seasonal Rain director Aung Phyoe came together with a group of friends to start a blog featuring creative writing. The stories written by Kyi Aye, an acclaimed modernist writer in Myanmar, were a favourite. The group would type her writings out from magazine scans and put them up on the blog. It was then that Aung Phyoe came across Kyi Aye’s short story “Seasonal Rain” and fell in love with its cinematic quality. “I was in my last year at film school and dying to make a short,” Aung Phyoe told SINdie, “So I contacted the writer’s family and asked for permission.”

Seasonal Rain is one of three entries from Myanmar screened at the 2019 SeaShorts Film Festival. It is the coming-of-age story of a young woman Aye Aye (Nyo Thu Nwe) catalysed by sudden rain on a day out. In a present-day Yangon setting, the subtlety of Aung Phyoe’s storytelling and the reticence of the characters appear almost anachronistic.

“Well, I love films by Naruse Mikio, the Japanese master and get influenced by him. I tried to convey what I want to say without being too obvious.”

“But the filmmaking style is influenced by Indian masters like Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mirnal Sen, where I use too much track shots. Later I realised some are not necessary,” Aung Phyoe added.

The shots in Seasonal Rain are thoughtfully composed. Aung Phyoe has a keen eye for layers and continuity. He is mindful of stylistic impression, but less so of emotional nuances, which makes the portrait of a young woman less vivid.

We asked Aung Phyoe what he enjoyed most about the filming process. He said, “Since it is my first short film, I just did it as I wanted to. Two of my film school friends from India came down to Yangon, and with the help of my local friends we shot it. I love this freedom, everything as I wanted to without questioning myself why.”

Seasonal Rain was well liked by the audience in Myanmar. Aung Phyoe was surprised that everyone from Myanmar said they preferred Seasonal Rain to his second film Cobalt Blue, which he found more sophisticated. Perhaps it was its simplicity that made Seasonal Rain down-to-earth and refreshing!

“It is difficult for independent filmmakers in Myanmar, as everywhere,” Aung Phyoe observed, “But in recent years, there are a few hard-working producers who want to produce short films by young filmmakers.” Without government support though, it is difficult for young filmmakers to make feature films of the mainstream format.

Myanmar’s local mainstream film industry is doing well, Aung Phyoe told us. However, “storytelling is mostly the same old thing.”

“But I am hopeful as the new generation of filmmakers is trying to make an impact at the international festival circuit as well as the local domestic market – we could set up the Myanmar New Wave soon."

Written by Teenli Tan

We Still Have to Close Our Eyes is a short film by Filipino director John Torres. The short film was programmed at the Toronto International Film Festival’s Wavelengths Shorts program. It was programmed together with the title ‘Lives of Perfomers’, offering intensely personal visions of the directors.

John Torres is an independent film director, producer and writer, widely known for his highly personal and poetic styles. He often intercuts and weaves together found footage, archival clips into powerful montages and elliptical sequences that unfold in unique narratives often with strong autobiographical references if not relating to current events, that tend to defy genres and tropes.

The overarching narrative of We Still Have to Close Our Eyes, plays out primarily over text on screen, and sees human avatars, being controlled and exploited by apps as well as the ominous presence of the police and government regulations. The plot itself is relatively loose, playful and surreal but it constantly pulls at larger topical issues, that elevates it into something much more pressing and important.

The film is presented in a documentary style and is interestingly repurposed footage captured on film sets, particularly of Lav Diaz, Erik Matti and several others. The presence of police is constant and made somewhat menacing despite an awareness that this is simply behind the scenes footage and even actual scenes from the film. Overall under the director’s experienced hand, this all naturally works in the format he seems comfortable with and doesn’t overstay its runtime without ever feeling indulgent or clumsy.

This familiar process of repurposing and re-contextualizing the footage creates an almost eerie but romantic mood. The elliptical storytelling tenuously flits in and out and is playfully poking at current events of problematic police systems and the trend of mobile apps to create a mythical world grounded in memory.

However, what seems to come out as well is Torres' hungry use of the other filmmaker's scraps and excesses. We constantly become almost by design, aware of Torres on the periphery of something larger, and utilising the productions overuse of light, props, costumes and extras - and as such become pulled into a second narrative of the filmmaker and filmmaking itself, and of status between the bigger filmmakers in the limelight and the ones in the periphery. That he used films that have already been paid for to create a new narrative he sets out to overcome financial limitations for the independent filmmakers. For me this is the more impressive story but it may pass by unnoticed.

Overall the film is easily summarised as a dreamlike fable on policing and society’s never ending exploitation of the less privileged for both economic and political gain. It isn’t hard hitting nor is it facile, the film is still impressionable and noteworthy at the very least, especially in the context of the filmmaker's process.

The first thing that strikes you about Cleaners is its unique photocopied texture – or, per the term modern Internet slang has appropriated for itself, aesthetic. In this day and age, where filters are applied liberally to all sorts of mobile device-produced audiovisual material, this opening comes across as rather adorably gimmicky at first.

Then, you catch sight of briefly (mis)coloured frames, like a missed white spot here or moments where the colouring doesn’t quite line up over there. Upon sustained scrutiny, you observe that those long, unbroken strokes of what are distinctly highlighter shades of yellow, green, pink etc. certainly do not repeat themselves – in other words, the highlighting effect has not been generated digitally. When, past the title card, this particular visual style refuses to abate, you know that this has been no parlour trick: director Glenn Barit & co. have indeed put together a film stacked entirely out of sequenced photocopied stills.

If one has suspicions about whether each still was really coloured by hand to resemble secondary school notes at the mercy of a six-pack highlighter set, Barit is forthcoming about the entire process in an email interview with SINdie:

“The process we came up with is that we first shot it digitally. After our offline edit piclock, we exported individual images at 8 frames per second. [...] We then printed them in a photocopy texture, individually manually highlighted all the protagonists’ frames, batch-scanned all the papers and finally assembled them all back in post.”

The numbers are also staggering. Barit estimates a total of 34,560 printed stills, which were highlighted by a team comprising six full-time highlighters (what a job title), three highlighters from the main crew, as well as miscellaneous volunteer highlighters who chipped in during weekends and off-times. Together they ran through 300 highlighters over 23 days. Frankly, this sounds like one of those bizarre Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) Mathematics questions to my Singaporean ear.

And yet, there is nothing remotely fictional about this scenario. Cleaners brings to life stories about a handful of teenagers who find themselves embroiled in their personal high school dramas. Loosely inspired by Barit’s own experiences, the four vignettes of eight kooky characters are bookended by scenes from the beginning and ending of the school year respectively. While the film can be easily filed away under the coming-of-age genre, plodding through it, one gradually gets a sense that these are not replicable stories – despite what the photocopied stills may seem to suggest. Why, then, this presentation style?

Most obviously, this copier style evokes the passage of time, or at least that sense of being sent back in time. No doubt the photocopied papers recall to mind one’s school-going years. Barit had intended to capture the sentiment of handmade high school projects, whereas what had been summoned for me was the not-so-affectionate memory of highlighting heaps and heaps of notes. One can name many ways Barit’s team could have made this project less insufferable for themselves, such as weaving in the photocopier effect only at certain milestones, but its enduring presence suggests that all of memory is pliable to wear and tear. Watching Cleaners makes one feel almost as if the film is emerging from an ocean of collective consciousness, slightly corroded by time but remaining very much lucid and tangible.

Cleaners also returns us to Tuguegarao City, Cagayan in 2007. Barit says, “The time and place I chose for the film seem to be rich in cultural specificities and I thought I could derive different [colourful] and maybe relevant stories from there.” Truly, no one will be much delighted to receive a new Blackberry phone these days. Hence this threadbare look the film wears is not just an homage to one’s formative years, it is also a way of signposting that the act of accessing these narrative requires you, the audience, to be funnelled through a time machine. What time machine? Why, the photocopier of course.

Another idea that leapt out – or, perhaps, that was highlighted– is the idea of dismantling one’s tools of oppression. Photocopier machines are by all measures industrial. These appliances exist chiefly to reproduce their sources with uniformity. By co-opting an apparatus instrumental in the duplicating process into a film that is duplicated only in form (and not function), Barit makes a strong case against following conventions blindly.

This idea is likewise what threads all four vignettes together. Cleaners unfolds in a way that is not unlike watching the erection of a human pyramid. Sure, the stories make sense on their own, but one stands to gain the most perspective when these vignettes are assembled together and read with respect to those that come both before and after. This is why, by the end of the film, “II. Nutrition Month” is not just about a girl with an ironic disdain for dirt (as in earth). It is also about how dirt (as in filth and corruption) pervades a country at every level of its existence, and how these young adults – so youthful and unblemished in the beginning – must learn to come to terms with their reality.

Part of this journey involves the eight characters making tiny breakthroughs of their own: one child progresses from demanding the respect she is owed as class president, to understanding that respect is something to be cultivated and earned; another two realise that they can no longer be cowed into social shame if they don’t allow themselves to be victimised by other people’s taunts in the first place. Hence Cleaners simply says that in a world that purports to be clean, fair and just, and yet is anything but, one can either continue to uphold this fundamentally broken system or choose to live subversively and authentically.

“The socio-political climate [in Cleaners] is distinct,” affirms Barit. “We don’t just breeze through high school thinking about ourselves. As early as high school, we realize how backward the structures in place are, how crazy our politicians are, and how historically forgetful we are, among other things. I think our concerns are more rooted and more communal since we are not an economically and politically stable country and we are historically colonized.”

Delivering forth such socio-politically heavy messages may seem like a depressing mission, particularly when teenage characters are used as the vehicle for these ideas. But what Cleaners seems to be getting at here is also the notion that the rousing of one’s socio-political consciousness does not have to be all doom and gloom. These characters, poised for adulthood and possessed of youthful vigour, are the agents of change we need for a revolution. Only these kids would dare to bare their hearts, transform their vulnerability, empower themselves to revolt against a nonsensical and oppressive system. In that sense they are all alike – living copies of each other – and perhaps the only time we need more of something, is when that something is a force for good. Hope is coming. The kids are all right.

Following a brutal rape by her colleague, a departmental store sales girl goes on a rage-driven rampage against anyone who tried to take advanatge of her in her life, basically all men. The trigger, pardon the pun, is her discovery of a revolver gun just outside her house, left behind by someone. With a gun in her hand, hence the film’s title (Babae at Baril simply means girl with a gun), she is suddenly bestowed with a new-found confidence and voice and is about to go around setting things right. With the groovy beats of the film’s action-genre soundtrack with a whiff of a 70s Studio 54 sound, one can be mistaken into thinking this is heading in the direction of a girl-power flick where men will learn to behave. But soon, a bevy of new unfamiliar characters appear throwing us off tangent, leaving us to figure out if these people are about to steal the thunder from our heroine.

It turns out this is a six degree of separation, ala Crash (2004 Oscar Best Picture winner), kind of a movie and the real central character is the revolver. A revolver gets passed from one character to the next over several periods of time and in its journey, we stumble into the lives of different characters, differentially troubled, and all circumstantially changed by the possession of a gun. It begins with a cop-turned-rookie robber who is lured by greed, followed by his son who picks up the revolver hidden in the drawer a decade later, executed with an artful ‘drawer’ time warp. It then gets passed on to a young male Balut (Filipino street delicacy) street vendor in an unfortunate shooting-dare situation, and then to a young street gangster who uses it to rob a house but killed the old female owner in the process.

Evidently, the audience is taken on a ride not just through a clever, formulaic plot device, but a thoughtful adaptation of this device in the context of a Filipino slum neighbourhood. The characters are undeniably a nasty lot but they are also manifestations of the city Director Rae Red hopes to portray. Harking back to the film’s opening, against the grimy nightscape we see the bumbling of motor and human traffic and we are beckoned into the groove of the city through the beats of a song that turns out to be an impolite take on all that is bad, entrenched and real in the city - ‘alcohol, gambling, coffee, women’. It is a rude a tone-setter for the mayhem we are about to witness and the film does not mince its steps in forcing us to come face-to-face with urgent issues of crime, drug pushing, extra-judiciary violence by the police and women’s positions in this deplorable social construct. Nothing would have come close to the revolver as a plot device in creating the string of life and death situations and digging deep into the psyche of crime in the city. Anything less would have muddied Director Rae Red’s vision of the film.

Director Red is generous with the characters’ backstories and inner worlds, giving us an ample window into their lives and their relationship with violence. Little touches like the boy and the girl playing with the revolver as a toy and the parallel juxtaposition of the gun-toting action drama on television against the reality of the situation, enrich the layers behind what could end up being just a genre-flick. Also, despite taking us through the revolver’s lineage of male owners, it does not get overlooked that this film still pivots mostly around a female empowerment story. Director Red had a handful of character arcs to deal with, but we are led to be most invested with the sales girl, played with raw emotions, and a huge amount of hair dishevelling, by Janine Gutierrez. She exposes wounds women face in society and finds herself at a turning point where she could call the shots. It is almost as if to ask for all the male-inflicted violence the revolver has been a tool to, how will a female handle it. The answer is, she made good of that opportunity.

I am convinced in the film, Director Red is painting the audience a picture of the city more than a mere portrait of the character. There is a palpable sense of rage and pent up energy pervading through characters in this city from the protagonist herself to her store manager to the street kids. And on that, Director Red commented, ”I think the capitalist and patriarchal system in place forces us to be unkind to each other. The manager may have a lot of pressure from the higher ups. The rapist might have grown up thinking he can get what he wants and get away with it. But in the end everyone is a victim under this system but especially women and women in the lower class.”

So, alcohol, gambling, coffee and women indeed.

Babae at Baril won Best Director and a special Gender Sensitivity Award at the 2019 QCinema International Film Festival, while its lead actress Janine Gutierrez walked away with the Best Actress award. Having made its world premiere at the festival, we look forward to seeing at other festivals.

Review by Jeremy Sing

Fluorescent Adolescence

Screened at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival under the Short Cuts 01 progamme, Reminiscences of the Green Revolution is a short film from Dean Colin Marcial, a Philippines born New York based filmmaker. He is the co-founder of Calavera USA, a Brooklyn based production company whose work has screened at prestigious festivals such as Tribeca, South by Southwest and Sundance.

The film follows the recollections of one Yung Martin, following his memories through a group of young activists planning the occupation of the goldmine, in the time of the second EDSA revolution that ousted then-president Joseph Estrada in 2001. For a film that exists on this side of City of God and Y TuMamá También, Green Revolution bears the spectral DNA of its forefathers on its sleeve. Featuring seductively fluid handheld cinematography and a competent ensemble of youthful characters as they grapple with both their political ideals and sexual disentanglements, the film manages a dizzy snapshot of what it means to feel young and eternal, to be able to both harness impulse for a cause greater than yourself or to give into your basest impulse to fulfil a most selfish need. The film complicates its portrait of insouciance with a clincher of a conceit, by – SPOILER ALERT – having its lead narrator, Marty, speak from the after-life.

With this neat little trick, Marcial manages to render the ephemeral, eternal; it is no longer simply the prelude to the storm or the night before the coup and the results of their scheme no longer matter. This last night is now encased in the undying, free from the strictures of time, because it, like its narrator Marty, now dwell in time itself. If ghosts are immaterial because of a lack of the physical then time is spirit made material.

If I had but one request of the film, it would be that I wished we had more time in this world, with these characters, on the infinite pull of the night before everything changes. But perhaps brevity is its point, that often adolescence, sandwiched between dawdling infantilism and interminable adulthood, cuts through the muck and shines supernova bright but is all too brief and all too fragile; a phrase by David Foster Wallace that I am particularly fond of rings so true for this film – every love story is a ghost story.

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SINdie had the pleasure and opportunity of reaching out to the director to answer some of our questions for his work-

The film certainly with its youthful protestors, taps into a rich vein of current contemporary civil discontentment, with the protests in Hong Kong and Greta Thunberg’s youth climate strikes. What made you decide to tell this story from such a young point of view?

DCM: Because I’m a millennial? I think the most progressive and radical energies in these movements have come from the youngs because they’re perpetually borne into a world the olds keep wrecking.

I wrote this movie just before Trump’s inauguration around the time of being at the Women’s March in New York, so I think a lot of my feelings then were bleeding into the script. I thought about how I felt about the world when I was 21 or 22 and had these revolutionary ideas about changing it, and who I was friends with then and who I was in love with, and all the little dramas we’d occupy ourselves with while we were working together towards something. And it’s emotional— how can you not be? Cold hard logic got us our present reality. So this is a movie for romantics, sure, but I also wanted to testify to choosing people over politics. This is a love letter to all that, and a dedication for all the people who’ve fought and lost and those who continue to struggle.

The voice-over narration gave the film a distinctly nostalgic quality- like a story being countlessly retold and recounted – though its boldest move is to have its speaker come from beyond the grave. In this metaphysical leap, the forgotten and left behind are no longer forgotten and left behind. Do you see history playing a similar role?

DCM: History is being rewritten all the time— and usually it’s the powerful that get to do it. Part of what artists and critics do is reinterpret that history, dig up what’s been buried and bring a new perspective.

I’m raising the dead so that someone can tell us about an experience firsthand and have the distance of having decades pass. He conjures up his memories for the audience and that’s the movie you’re watching, and we’re left to wonder if that’s all there is after death, just wandering around aimlessly as a ghost remembering history. Sometimes I feel like this ghost, combing through scenes obsessively trying to extrapolate their meaning. Though at least I have a body to act with, while the narrator has lost his, and could only be a passive viewer to the march of time. It's up to the living to remember the dead and take action. A lot of us who worked on the film have lost someone close to us, some fighting for a cause (the Philippines after all, is the most dangerous place in the world for environmental defenders), others to forces way beyond our control— my dad actually passed away a few weeks before we were filming. In a way I think his spirit is imbued in this movie, and I hope that the some other ghosts inhabit it and get to live on that way too.

I understand that you were born in the Philippines but raised in Long Island and went to college at NYU. From what perspective did you approach Green Revolution’s historical basiswith? Did it feel like you were working from an insider’s view of the history or was it from outside looking in?

DCM: I wanted to tell the story of thirty years in a single evening, fifteen years after the end of the Marcos dictatorship and fifteen years before the election of Rodrigo Duterte. I read a lot about environmental movements in the United States and the Philippines and drew from activist accounts whenever I could find them, but I knew from the start that I wanted to fictionalize history so as not to exploit it.

Growing up a third culture kid, I never feel like I belong to anywhere in particular: it’s hard to consider myself a Filipino filmmaker, an American Filmmaker, or a Fil-Am filmmaker because I think my work spans beyond that specific national experience. I feel most comfortable in the in-between, and want to continue exploring those spaces.

Ultimately, though I wrote and directed the film, so many people informed and influenced the process, from my producers Armi & Raya to Gian, who brought poetry to his translation and Gym who lensed it, the dream cast and crew-- so I'm not sure if it can be categorized as an insider or an outsider's film. It's kind of a mix-- "halo-halo" in Tagalog.

Written by Koh Zhi Hao

A construction worker suffers from a ghastly gash on his abdomen. A poet speaks to eager, young students. A young man in a “I Love Singapore” shirt weeps as he prays. While these three figures may seem disparate in relation, they are all connected by their roles as Bangladeshi migrant workers based in Singapore. This background forms the core of I Dream of Singapore, a documentary film by award-winning filmmaker Lei Yuan Bin, which explores the Bangladeshi migrant community in Singapore.

The documentary revolves around the journey of Feroz, a migrant worker. Feroz suffered a terrible injury on his abdomen at a construction site and was denied proper medical treatment by his employer. Now under the care of social workers from Dayspace, he awaits his return home. We witness the recovery of Feroz, alongside the acute loneliness he faces for most of his days. By trailing a single migrant worker’s journey back home, the film expands its vision from individual to community: we are invited to the migrant’s home, family, and the larger community of Bangladesh as well.

A key moment in the film is when Feroz bids farewell to his case worker, a kindly gentleman who is always brimming with compassion. The scene is unexpectedly emotional, as they hug and embrace each other; some tears are even shed. With the genuineness and unfiltered sincerity of both individuals shining through, this was one of the most heartfelt moments in the film.

I Dream of Singapore plays with juxtapositions. Scenes frequently transition between the two different locations, Singapore and Bangladesh, with little context or warning given. Mid-way into the film, we are treated to the sights of the bustling streets of Bangladesh, a hive of moment and life both in day and night. Flooded streets bustle with all sorts of vehicles, producing a cacophony of city life. A man tells us: “Bangladesh’s zero point is here.” In the day, we see street vendors, traders and farmers; one particular Bangladeshi painter stands amidst greenery, alone, indulged in his own artistic practice and without a care for the world.

Suddenly, we are back in the solitude of a dormitory in Singapore with Feroz. Apart from his mobile device, silence fills the air. There is a blatant contrast between the cacophonies of street life and that of the room’s silence; the transition between life and loneliness makes the plight faced by Feroz all the more tragic. But when we compare the Bangladeshi painter and Feroz, we realize that different types of solitude exist: one that is painful and lonely, as represented by Feroz, and another that is peaceful and desirable, as represented by the painter.

Lei also tends to takes the viewer into one country and then into the other, while maintaining the focus around the respective Bangladeshi communities in both countries. Thus, it can be difficult to make out where exactly Lei has placed us (the viewer) at first glance: is this scene situated in Bangladesh or Singapore? Are the statuses of these individuals now as citizens or as migrants? These juxtapositions probe on the parallels between the urban landscapes of these two countries, and more importantly, raises the question on the inextricable relationship between one's social role and social environment.

Yet, this film is not meant for everyone. Despite its lean run-time of 78 minutes, a large portion of the film is dedicated to lengthy sequences that depict nothing more than the daily routines of the Bangladeshi migrant. Most scenes were on-the-fly and slow-paced, often with little to no action occurring. Scenes that rapidly transitioned from one place to another were also rather confusing due to the lack of narrative context, making the film not as lucid as it could have been. Indeed, the film humanizes the migrant workers as individuals—people with emotions, feelings and families too—but further development of this emotional connection with the audience is limited by these restrictions.

Perhaps the film’s emotional impact could have been more profound if the documentary felt less stretched out. Or maybe Lei intended to strive for a format that reflected the reality of life for these workers through a film that was largely unfiltered and raw. Of these views, I leave the viewer to be their own judge.

Undeniably, I Dream of Singapore successfully casts a humanizing light on the trials and tribulations of migrant workers in Singapore. By doing so, Lei gives a voice back to these migrant communities and reminds the viewer that they, too, are but only human. More frighteningly, through tracing Feroz's conundrum, viewers are presented with the fact that the violation of human rights can still exist in the modern day, even within contemporary Singapore. Review by Bryson NgI Dream of Singapore makes its world premiere at the upcoming Singapore International Film Festival.

With SGIFF just a week away, we catch up with Yuni Hadi, Festival stalwart and executive director, to talk about running a film festival, life lessons, and all the exciting additions to the historied Festival's 30th edition.

What are some of the things from #SGIFF30 that excite you?

The fact that we have become a regional platform that has weight enough to be able to launch Southeast Asian films! In a way, this is one of the reasons why we decided to have the three Festival commission this year. We wanted to work with up-and-coming filmmakers whose careers have an association with us, and Mouly Surya, Anocha Boonyawatana, and Chris Yeo are directors who have had, in very recent years, their films play very prominent position in SGIFF. Given the general theme of the commission to be about celebrating cinema, we feel that these three filmmakers represent this ethos and the future of Southeast Asian films in a very good way because of the kinds of works they are, and have been, making.

We will also be launching a special series of limited edition postcards based on fan-art of iconic contemporary Singapore films that have shown at the Festival and won awards globally. It will feature five films, interpreted by local creatives who will reimagine the film posters in their own styles. In some sense, being able to do this really makes you appreciate just how far we have come with Singapore cinema—we would not have been able to do this project even 20 years ago.

I think SGIFF turning 30 is also really meaningful to the regional filmmakers, and this is something that reflects the dual roles that we are playing today—the first is obviously celebrating filmmakers and the films they make, while the other is celebrating the audience that has grown with us, and the new audience that we are connecting with now. Our audience has grown quite a bits over the past five year, and we are happy and grateful for that.

Going back to the roots, what were your favourite moments throughout the years and this long relationship you have had with the Festival?

One edition that really jumps at me is the 21st edition of the Festival, way back in 2008, when we were organising the Silver Screen Awards and we had all these filmmakers like Victric Thng, Tania Sng, and Boo Junfeng, who were helping us put together the awards. They were literally physically helping us as part of the team to put everything together, and then they will go home to change and come back to attend the actual awards. This was one experience that I had where I could really feel the community elements, and how much the filmmakers cared for the Festival to the extent that they would spend the amount of time they did helping with all these things.

Generally speaking, my favourite moments every year are when the audience and their favourite filmmakers meet during the post-show dialogues. When we brought down iconic filmmakers such as Fruit Chan, Darren Aronofsky, Im Kwon Taek, and Tran Ahn Hung, we had audiences who will bring out posters and DVDs for autographs; it really shows the level of engagement and growth of the Singapore film scene that you have these cinephiles who have watched every work of their favourite directors. We have all these people meeting their cinematic heroes, most of whom are Asian filmmakers, and that is just how sophisticated our audience is.

This year we are bringing down Pang Ho-cheung and Takashi Miike, and we have people saying how excited they are and how much they are looking forwards to being there. The tickets sold out very quickly, and even now, we have people coming up to say that they have been following their careers and please can they just buy a ticket. This happens to Singaporean filmmakers too; when we screened Royston Tan’s 15 last year, it was one of our first few films to be sold-out and we have audience members clamouring to see Royston and talk to him about the film.

We have put in a lot of work in the industry and we are slowly creating a place where filmmakers are legitimately recognised for their works. It also gets us to reflect on what is our role as a Festival, when the audience grows with us. Having the audience say things such as "I watched my first Hou Hsiao-hsien film here”, or even my own niece who is 17 and wants to watch Naomi Kawase films, makes me very proud that this Festival can connect with someone who is sixteen as much as someone who is sixty, and they are watching the same films.

What is one thing you have always wanted to do with the Festival and have you done it?

Creating the Southeast Asian Producers Network and the Youth Jury & Critics Programme (YJCP) was something that I am really proud of—these were things that I am personally invested in wanting to make happen.

I think the YJCP is something that we really wanted to do when we re-started the Festival in 2014. I was really inspired by a few festivals around the world that have these youth jury programmes where there are these grade-school kids watching really sophisticated films. It gave me that ambition to grow our audience this way, using films to discuss difficult topics, or even just to broaden the mind of our children. It does not always have to be about the art of filmmaking necessarily, but that the story resonates with young people, and we can use it as a discussion platform.

What is the hardest part of running a film festival for you?

I think the hardest part is finding a good balance of films to show. When you watch films you get very excited about the films you personally endorse, and when you do a festival, you try to present a certain tone of what the festival is about. For us, the real struggle for us is really to narrow down the films because we can only show so many films within these ten days. There are great arguments and debates about it, but it is also the most fun part in a way.

For SGIFF in particular, I think the other challenge that presented itself in the past few years was trying to find that footing of having the confidence to articulate what we are about. We are an international film festival that spotlights Southeast Asian cinema and talent, and we want to grow an audience for that. It is being able to be confident and not easily swayed by the trend, and we are really proud to have been able to do that. After five years, I feel that the identity now is quite clear. You do not need to say it in so many words now; people can feel it, and people can see.

…and conversely, what is the easiest part?

For me, not necessarily the easiest, but the most enjoyable part is really just watching the films. This is a dream job if you love movies; I watch it for work, and when I am free, I want to go to cinemas and continue watching films. The most exciting thing is when we watch and discover.

We have our Southeast Asian Short Film Competition, and when we see a bright new talent it gets really exciting because you can really feel that spark and you want to share it with the world.

For example, even though the participants of the YJCP may not have watched a Southeast Asian film before, we are in this position to introduce cinema of this region to them, and they will then gain this added dimension to their taste and how they make decisions on what to watch. I think one very lovely thing about youths is that when they are excited about something, they spread their joy; they ask their friends to watch it and even bring their parents sometimes.

For me, its my secondary school teacher. She used to go to the Festival when I was in secondary school, and I will go too—now that I am working in the Festival, she is a regular audience and she is so proud of the fact that I am her student, and she would always ask me for recommendations every year. Seeing how the Festival reach out to people from all walks of life, coming together for a common passion, I think that is pretty cool.

Even with Singapore itself being so small and having a national film festival that has lasted for thirty years as an independent entity… I think it really says something about our position and how it is still important. If we were not needed, we would not be here.

If you have one thing to say to the Yuni attending her first ever SGIFF, and another for the Yuni helming #SGIFF50, what would they be?

I can clearly remember the early years attending SGIFF when I was in secondary school, and going to the cinema at Golden Mile, the Odeon. It is a lot like trying out new food and going to new places you have never been before; it inculcates an adventurous spirit and I recommend all young people to try this—it does not matter if you end up liking a new thing or not. The best thing about trying is that it opens your heart. I travel to festivals all over the world and make friends who come from countries so far away that you never would have thought you would make a friend from there. I think it will only make your life richer when you are open to new things, and if you love stories and story-telling, you will find your tribe. I encourage people to have that adventurous spirit, and I really thank my parents for allowing to become this dreamer, for giving me this freedom.

For my older self: do not hold on to things too tightly; leave room for things to happen, and be flexible and able to adjust to different situations. I think the best about the Festival is that it is as much about films as it is about people—the creator and the audience.

Your audience really determines the atmosphere of a screening: if you have people who are actively reacting to things, it improves the vibe and the experience of the films themselves. It feeds into why the post-show discussions are so important, and I think the questions being asked now are so much more interesting than twenty years ago. Back then if you ask if anyone has a question, you just get crickets - now you have people who are genuinely curious and interested. I think for filmmakers, the audience also challenges them to think more about what they are doing, so they cannot take the easy route of saying "I don’t want to explain my art.”

In the future, my dream would also be to pass down my knowledge and create a good working environment because we always forget about the people behind the scene—one thing that happens now is we always see the team photo, and it is my way of acknowledging those that have worked for the Festival through the years.

I feel that the experience of going to the movies have really changed from the time that I started attending the Festival. For me, to go from being a fan to being a curator to now running the Festival, I have come full-circle.

The homecoming of Anthony Chen is in many ways one of the most highly anticipated events in the Singapore film landscape. Being the first Singaporean to clinch a Golden Horse and a Cannes Camera d'Or, all with one of the most stunning debut in Asian film history, it is almost impossible to imagine that Chen did it all in his twenties.

Now back with his sophomore that is set to open the 30th Edition of the Singapore International Film Festival alongside a slate of nominations at the Golden Horse again, Chen sits down for a quick chat with editor Alfonse Chiu to talk more about having a perfectionist streak, screenwriting, and ways of wrangling actors.

What was the writing process like for Wet Season?

It was long. It took me three years to write. Ilo Ilo only took two; at this rate I might not write all my films going forward because it just takes too long. I write from a very personal place too, which makes it even longer, and I cannot even tell you how many drafts I went through because that is not the way I work.

In a way, I write very chaotically and erratically—I just have this sense of the journey would unfold; where the film will start, and where it will end. In fact, I always have the last scene in mind, and then I try to find what else happens because almost everything drop in bits and pieces. For the last two to three years, my team sort of knew the idea I was working on but whenever they say “Please, can you send us the script?” I will tell them I could not. I had complete scenes here and there but they do not make sense when put together. To me, the writing process is a journey of trying to join these dots together. I cannot keep count of how many drafts I go through but when it is done, it is done, and I usually make very little changes to the final script. As a producer I may edit the writings of other directors, such as Kirsten Tan, but as a writer, I am very private about the work.

How did you come up with the story?

It always starts with an idea that comes into my head and then I just start to obsess about it. I knew Ilo Ilo was going to be a story about a boy and his Filipino maid the same way that I knew Wet Season is about a 40-year old woman who is having a mid-life crisis and struggling through her family life and her work life, who needs to learn how to walk out of it all.

I knew what I wanted. I would hold on to these characters and relationships, and then I would be so compulsively obsessed with them until I figured it out. It is a whole journey of figuring out how they got to where they are, and that is when all the other parts will start filling up. I cannot go into a set without a full understanding of everything about my characters. If I cannot persuade myself, I cannot persuade my audiences. I dare say that when I go into production, I can play every single character in the film—if I was a woman, I can play Yeo Yann Yann’s character. I can hear the pauses, the tone, the emotions, so if it is wrong, I know it immediately. For me, precision and clarity is a very big part of my work, and there are usually very little excess fat. If it takes two lines to say something, I would not say it in one or three. When I am shooting, I do not shoot shots that I will not use. I am very economical this way.

What is the production process like once you finished your writing?

While things were precise on the script, things became a complete nightmare once we started production. I started with casting the boy. I was looking for a 16-year old teenager, and I told Koo Chia Meng, our casting director that we are going to find a fresh face. For Ilo Ilo, we went to eight schools and saw thousands of children. For Wet Season, we went to a lot of secondary schools, and saw hundreds of boys. We shortlisted some, they came into our workshops and we spent almost 8 months in workshops, just to find that boy. In the end though, we could not find the one and I chanced upon Koh Jia Ler again on Instagram. I saw his face and told my team, that this teenager has quite a good face, and then I realised it was Jia Ler! We brought him in to go through all of the improvisation, and very soon, we knew we were going to cast him.

After the boy, we had to go and find the teacher too. We were looking for someone in their late 30s or early 40s, and we went through almost the same process—we looked at many actors in Singapore, from theatre to TV, film actors, and even ex-TV actors. We also went to Kuala Lumpur to search, but we could not quite find it. It was then that I rang Yeo Yann Yann, and gave her the script. I did not want to cast Yann Yann again, after casting Jia Ler. Many people are likely to make this assumption that I wanted to bring my Ilo Ilo stars back, but it was not like that. Every one of the actors I casted had to go through a whole process, even Christopher Lee.

When we went into production, the nightmare on this film became the rain. It is called Wet Season, and it was just so hard to create rain on screen, but we did it anyway. We even explored visual effects—we went to post-production houses in Singapore, across Asia, in Europe and it was all too expensive because liquid effects are very hard to do. Even in Marvel films or The Shape of Water, the rains look fake, but they work because the world is so stylised and you sort of just buy it. However, my films are so naturalistic, that I could not buy it if the rain starts to jump out at you. I am very thankful that we had a very good art team who were in charge of the rain. We had a lot of complex rain scenes, some even done on the road with one take, so we had to do a lot of tests and fabricate special rain equipment.

How do you work with your actors?

I tend to be a very tough taskmaster. On this film in particular, I have done so many more takes than Ilo Ilo, that the average was like 15 and upwards. In fact, I broke my own record. I did 33 takes for the very last shot of Wet Season. My editor was so shocked, but she went to watch every single take and told me that everything did start to come to life at take 30. It was a close-up, and while you may think it is easy, some of the static shots were actually the hardest shots to do because this character is so complex. There is a lot going on but the emotions are never one-note or one-layer.

Even for my team and my crew, the degree of precision and detail I was after was almost too much, because I have grown as a filmmaker and I felt that we cannot keep making things at a certain level. I was so obsessed with everything—I could remember a scene that we were shooting near the end, where the Director of Photography thought it was going to be a bit bright, and pumped so much smoke into the scene that everything looked romantic. I got so angry because the look was just wrong. The technical team had to come in and wave all that smoke away and got everything out. We only started to shoot when it looked right. I remember my Assistant Director telling me to compromise, but I could not. I have grown so much, and once you see things a certain way, you cannot un-see them.

You became a father while making Wet Season, which mirrored the journey of the female character in a way, how did it feel?

I have come to believe that all the work that I get involved in gets personal in the end. Somehow, the work I do and my personal life just cross in a certain way, and I cannot unravel them. It is the same as my relationship with cinema. Some of my Taiwanese friends would ask me why I take everything so seriously, but I cannot treat what I do as a job no matter what. I care so much that it almost feels like my fate is tied in a certain way.

In my films, a lot of the emotions could feel very raw and naked, and that is partly because it is me stripping myself and putting my soul into it. I wish it does not need to be that painful and I am worried that it would get worse. When I was making this film, I finally understood why Hou Hsiao-hsien reshot Goodbye South, Goodbye thrice, why Wong Kar-wai can reshot a scene for three days, why he would do 100 takes.

How do you feel about Wet Season’s Golden Horse nominations?

To be honest, I was actually quite surprised, because a lot of the things in this film are so much more relatable if you are Singaporean or Malaysian. This is also partly why I care the most about how the audiences in Singapore and Malaysia, who can understand all the details and layers, will react to the film. Even during its Toronto premiere, many of the audience members saw the film at face value—while they did enjoy the film, there were many nuances they could not catch, whether it was the socio-political nuances of it or the dialects. There were many layers that they could not get, I was not sure if the jury would get it. In a way, I was relieved when I learnt of the nomination because it is as if the film has spoken. For me, it is always satisfying when people not familiar with the culture see the film and get the film, the value in the film. This, for me, is more gratifying than anything else.

For Lián and her family, daily entertainment is the scratching of chalk against shoddy metal, comfort a flimsy tarp on grimy ground, and home the claustrophobic entrapments of a cargo container. Enduring the exhaustion of the arid environment, they dream of landing on Long Beach, a place where, as Lián explains to her little brother, has no real sand.

Lián by Darren Teo is a direct criticism of the human trafficking operations in the late 90s to early 2000s, where Chinese immigrants were smuggled in the cargo containers of ships, enticed by false promises of a better life in America. Teo’s own elucidation of the year 1998 harks back to when the first stowaways were discovered, only to escalate in the following years, most strikingly in the three discovered deaths of Chinese nationals aboard the Cape May.

The film is an expose of the ugliness of human greed, the desperation of powerless families at the mercies of the traffickers, and above all, one young girl’s feisty determination.

For Lian, securing a water source for her family means a risky trip to the galley - dodging and evading crew members, clambering up and down staircases, slipping behind engineering pipes, and the like. The camera work is hasty and erratic as it snakes behind Lian, an ode to the teetering uncertainty of such escapades. As the camera swings frantically in tandem with Lian’s own movements, one understands the risk she takes on behalf of her family, time after time. The motif of being cornered is telling through the environments Lian is placed in – always stifling, cramped, slits of space, or else engulfed by the intersecting metal structures or monstrous mass of cubes. Credit has to be given for the unravelling of circumstance through the exposure of the environment, rather than mere verbal exposition.

Unfortunately, the film suffers from some pacing issues and could have been better served by a tighter and crisper editing deftness. Remaining engaged takes some conscious effort, made especially fatigued by the interview sequences matched with static shots that feel uncomfortably staged. There was indeed potential for the scene to stir a sense of indignation in audiences, given as it were that the presence of a potentially benevolent captain was cruelly outmatched by urgent cries lost in translation. Yet, the scene seemed to miss the opportunity for wordplays and wittier streaks in the conversation, and finding a precarious balance in the chemistry of the actors, fell flat overall in drumming up the intended outrage.

Regrettably, it is also difficult to find investment in the narrative of the family, potentially due to the weak establishment of familial relations that deprives one of a sense of endearment toward the trio. While cognitively understanding what is at stake, it is difficult to be emotionally immersed in the ongoing plight. It is relatively easier, however, to quickly take to Lian, for the admirable shouldering of responsibility way beyond her years, and for her shrewd streak that sees her drum up ploys to outwit her circumstances.

It is in the ending picture that the sense of helpless desperation finally suffuses - a myriad of coloured rectangular blocks stacked till the sky, with whirring machinery picking them up like child’s toys, jumbling them up into an unfathomable maze that ultimately foretells a heart-wrenching downfall. The lingering gaze out toward this numberless heap, coupled with Lian's own blank expression, is truly the most potent image that leaves an indent, effectively triggering a recollection to all the stories that came before Lian's, and all that stories that gravely come after.

Review by Jessica Heng

Lian will have its world premiere at the upcoming Singapore International Film Festival under Singapore Panorama Shorts.

When pondering a work of art, we often find ourselves grasping for a meaning that seems so fruitlessly out of reach. If “Revolution Launderette” proves anything, it’s that meaning need not always be deciphered. Not that it always can be, at least in this case. The film marks the sophomore feature of musician-filmmakers Mark Chua and Lam Li Shuen.

Chua and Lam are the co-founders of Emoumie, a Singapore-based film and music

Production company that prides itself on artistic exploration and experimentation. The pair have produced compositions and sound projects that have been presented around the globe. The past two years marked their foray into filmmaking.

Their previous feature length endeavour, “Cannonball” (2018), left much less of an impact than its title may suggest. In it, Chua and Lam play the main characters in a semi-autobiographical odyssey across Australia. “Cannonball” was a film that teetered between a fictional narrative and a documentary. To the film’s detriment, the directors failed to commit to either, let alone strike a balance between the two. Ultimately, the film’s highly experimental nature made me deem it more worthy of a museum exhibit than a silver screen.

With “Revolution Launderette”, the directors combine a plethora of genres that make for an even more precarious balancing act. There are elements of drama, animation, music, experimentation, fantasy, and be it intentional or not –– comedy. Yet as precarious as this seems, Chua and Lam manage to tread the fine lines between these genres ever so carefully. As careful as they are however, the film still struggles to find a middle ground between them all. As a result, the whole is lesser than the sum of its parts.

Funnily enough, the film’s plot is even more enigmatic than its title. The film is set in Tokyo, Japan, where Tomo (played by Keisuke Baba), and his partner Hiroko (played by Kiko Yorozu) throw themselves into every encounter that comes their way. Between their encounters, they exchange philosophical ramblings about dreams, freedom and existence. Tomo eventually embarks on a journey to, quote on quote, “beat his existence to the next punchline”. Poetic as this may sound, there is little poetry to be found in the musings of the main characters.

To the filmmakers’ credit, there is a competence to the filmmaking here that was absent in their previous film. Cinematic necessities like sound and image quality have been given much needed attention. If this proves anything, it’s that Chua and Lam work best behind the camera rather than in front of it.

The most notable feature was the music. The soundtrack provides Chua and Lams’ most virtuoso display of their musical talent. The pairs’ background in experimental sound-making left me disappointed with their previous feature length effort. “Cannonball” was severely lacking in that domain. With “Revolution Launderette”, Chua and Lams’ combination of orchestral instrumentals with hints of jazzy acoustics make for a lively and energetic score. They even spliced in the punk rock tunes of various underground indie groups from Japan.

I wanted to highlight a sequence where two street side statues begin discussing philosophy. Even though the scene bore little relevance to the plot, it stuck out to me the most. I got the sense that the filmmakers made it, not because it was necessary, but simply because they could. As haphazard as that may sound, it was one of the aspects I admired the most. Moments like this remind me of the joy that comes with simply picking up a camera and shooting the first thing you find interesting. Perhaps the spontaneity of the two directors is mirrored by the spontaneity of the two main characters. It’s arguably the most honest form of cinema, even if it isn’t the most engaging.

This laissez-faire approach harkens back to the exploratory spirit of the French New Wave. Much like the works of Jean-luc Godard or Agnes Varda, “Revolution Launderette” is so unburdened by the conventions of narrative storytelling.

Interestingly, I found Tomo to be a contemporary echo of Pierrot (as played by Jean-Paul Belmondo), the titular protagonist of Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou” (1965). Perhaps the most striking similarity is the manner in which they drown themselves in their own poetry and beliefs. If anything, Tomo’s philosophical musings may as well as have been lifted from the pages of Pierrot’s diary. Though unlike Pierrot, Tomo’s musings tend to overstay their welcome, along with many other elements that bog the film’s pacing.

Not all films need to be made for a particular audience, but it’s also hard to imagine a film like this finding one. Some moments are intriguing, while others are simply head scratching. However, I can’t deny that “Revolution Launderette” is a fascinating, if not puzzling, exercise in breaking the rules of cinema.

Roughly a decade after the Singapore premiere of the omnibus Lucky7 in the 2008 edition of the Singapore International Film Festival (see picture below from the 2008 post-screening Q&A), I found watching it to be a cringe fest. Perhaps that’s a harsh way of saying the film is one of the best time capsules of the nascent filmmaking scene in Singapore over the last 10 years.

Lucky7 is a project that involved seven filmmakers each making a segment of a feature film using the same actor, some parameters and information about the ending of the previous segment and the beginning of the next segment. It’s like a parlour game on steroids, a telematch that brought together ‘film people’ in the scene then - early movers, early movers who won some awards, and lots of wannabes.

I was one of these wannabes, a hobbyist-filmmaker eager to meet others like me who were excited about how the filmmaking movement was evolving. It was a time when a few young names were already starting to put Singapore on the world map such as Boo Junfeng, Sun Koh, Ho Tzu Nyen. Their serious works aside, the Lucky7 project offered something akin to a playground where the filmmakers put aside egos and reservations and competed in creating scenes that make you go WTF.

When in pain, sing in Tagalog

Watch Sunny Pang, the lead actor helming all seven segments break into a Tagalog song in the middle of another familiar HDB living woes indie drama set up (in director Sun Koh's segment). Taking care of his bed-ridden dad nurtured the Filipino domestic helper in him indeed.

Singapore got desert meh?

Filmmaker K Rajagopal wants you to believe so. And we could have all been fooled. In segment 2, Sunny Pang trudges up and down sandy dune-lets and with artificially injected howling of the wind, the segment turned a Tampines sand fill into Timbuktu.

Life in plastic

Also in Rajagopal's segment, Sunny Pang is in love with a cross-dressing male mannequin. This affection is very complex.

A cucumber-only refrigerator

Still segment 2, after a seismic humping session between Sunny Pang and a prostitute, it is revealed that she has hitherto been sitting on a cucumber, in a moment of oddball humour. The cucumber then makes it to a certain cucumber fraternity in the refrigerator (a fridge filled with cucumbers like in a Tsai Ming Liang movie). Bet it said to the rest, ”I need to take shower.”

What colour is your underwear today?

Sunny receives an sms with the following message. If you need to know, it's Ris Low's favourite colour.

Shady casting choice

In Boo Junfeng's segment, actress Chermaine Ang, a face not seen in a decade, played a transitioning gay man, whom his grandmother, with her failing senses, is unable to recognise.

Science lesson #2 Helium

Inhaling helium makes the higher-pitched tones resonate more in the vocal tract, amplifying them so they are louder in the mix. At the same time, it makes the lower tones resonate less in the vocal tract. The two effects combine to create a Chipmunk-like, flat sound. Watch Boo Junfeng's segment for a demo.

Where do floating balloons end up?

I always wondered where balloons that you release up in the air end up? Won’t we get fined for littering if it ends up somewhere on some property? Or does it just drift away into the wide ocean in the South China Sea? No. You will see them again deflated and punctured on the road next to your home the next morning.

Molestation cases on the rise

Brian Gothong Tan’s segment paints a picture of a grimy Singapore where sick people are rife. In the film, a dubious male character collects newspaper clippings of molestation cases and pastes then side by side in a scrapbook (which basically makes it look like the ‘Home’ section of the Straits Times today). You think this segment is going on a ‘mind of a molester expose’ journey, until suddenly the young girl he follows pulls down her own panties and I am lost.

New Arcade Game: ‘Void Deck Voyeur’

Sunny Pang the child molester meets his match and they both engage in a shoot down among the pillars in a HDB void deck. That’s how you play this computer game. Filmmaker Brian takes a giant genre leap by migrating this story into video game style animation. Players get ready!

What happened to Lim Kay Tong?

This familiar face in the 90s, synonymous with the Citibank ‘Chilli Crab’ ad, has somewhat disappeared from our screens. You would think he would dominate the grandpa role market, but unfortunately Zhu Houren and Chen Shucheng are the market leaders in this category. Filmmaker Chew Tze Chuan’s segment in Lucky7 offers Lim Kay Tong in a very different look. Somewhat mental.

We used to hate the censors a lot more

In Chew’s segment, a narratively messy one, someone walks around with a gigantic pair of scissors and starts aiming somewhere below the belt and cuts away. Blood gushes out like a geyser. All that bloody madness is punctuated in the middle by the Great Singapore Workout (cringey National Health Board’s invention from the 90s). That’s how much we hated the censors.

SMRT not likely to allow people to film in their train depots ever again

The sixth segment, Ho Tzu Nyen’s segment, is a what some people say just a lazy and convenient recap of the other segments. But hey, he made it different by being so extra and staging it at the Bishan MRT station. Years later this thing happened: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/transport/two-americans-believed-to-be-behind-vandalism-at-smrts-bishan-depot-in-2011 Good luck to those who want to shoot at a train depot again! Fans of Chris Yeo or Yeo Siew Hua, who made A Land Imagined, look out for split second shots of him being and playing a DOP in this segment. These collaboratives are excellent places to play ‘Before they were famous’.

Everything had to be CMIO-ed then

CMIO refers to Chinese, Malay, Indian and Others. Purposed for social cohesion, everything in Singapore had to have a CMIO mix, from National Day billboards to TV programmes. This film was not spared the ideology. Sunny Pang, after scaling deserts and playing charades at the Bishan MRT train depot, is a total wreck and sleeps overnight at Changi Beach. Upon waking up, characters appear before him in a silo-ed CMIO (CIM to be exact) sequence - a friendly Chinese uncle who collects trash, a horny Indian couple who prefer the beach to the bedroom and a seemingly suicidal Malay girl who was actually just taking a dip in the water. Seriously, Tania Sng who directed this segment should have used Singapore’s most versatile actor Dennis Chew for this entire sequence.

Lucky Seven played at Filmgarde yesterday under the 30th edition of the Singapore International Film Festival. Thank you for bringing this back.

Written by Jeremy Sing. Jeremy was a line producer for 2 segments of the film, by K Rajagopal and Ho Tzu Nyen. Lucky7 was one of the first films reviewed on SINdie in 2008, in collaboration with Stefan Shih who ran In A Nutshell Review. Check out this article here.

Shown in the Concorso internazionale category of this year’s prestigious Locarno Film Festival, Yosep Anggi Noen’s The Science of Fictions (trans. Hiruk-pikuk si al-kisah) received a special mention among the line-up. A co-production between Indonesia, Malaysia, and France, the resulting film is an absurdist’s paradise, touching upon the art of self-mythologies, shared historical trauma, and the resulting interplay of cultural, technological, and social forces––all centred around a moon landing. The use of the moon landing as the anchoring event comes as no surprise, with us, as a civilization, having recently celebrated 50 years since Apollo 11.

Indeed, the conspiracy theories surrounding its supposed fabrication continue to endure years on, gesturing towards our propensity not only for doubt, but a desire to understand the boundaries of reality as they manifest as a confounding mix of fact and fiction. The innate for that “a-ha!” moment translates well in The Science of Fictions where I, as much as others (I’m sure), looked to decipher the purpose of certain themes, characters, and scenes throughout the film.

Opening with a shot through a round window, we observe protagonist Siman (played by Gunawan Maryanto) as he turns, walking slowly within the confines of space. As though fighting against heavy air, his movements are indolent––the shot is coloured with a melancholy blue. A voiceover coming from the television sets the scene for the significance of the moon landing in the film, that certain stones originating from the moon had been found on Indonesian islands hundreds of years ago. Shifting to black and white, Siman finds himself in the jungle, stumbling upon a film crew shooting a moon landing. Eyes glistening in the shadows, they find him and perhaps if it isn’t clear already, he had seen something he wasn’t meant to see and for that, his tongue is cut out. So, what’s the deal? Did the moon landing really happen? Was it all just shot in some remote jungle in Indonesia? Does it actually matter? “History is written by the victors”, whether you believe it’s Churchill or Machiavelli who said it, the point remains––history is contextual, grounded in subjective experience and its transmission determined by those who have the power to set things in motion. In his director’s statement, Noen argues:

“In this digital era, history can be written by anyone... The most fictional era in Indonesia was the time when Soekarno, the first president, was replaced by Soeharto by a coup. Nobody knew about the real situation or you could say the truth at the time. Everyone has their own version of the story… All will look empirical; all the stories from many sources will make us drown into all that is fiction. Repeated lies, confronted with other lies will lead to the understanding of truth.”

Ridiculed for his slow movements, Siman is ostracised by villagers. Manipulated and ultimately commoditised as a labourer and as entertainment for village gatherings and weddings, his desire to become an astronaut, to express and reveal what he had seen that night in the jungle, is reduced to an act by others. Hard-working and trusting, his wages go toward his efforts at building a structure akin to the Apollo 11 command module and having a tailor-made spacesuit made. Historical and political trauma is a shared experience––the lies we believe as a culture and a society come to inform behaviour and idealogy. For Siman, he is collectively reduced as a means to an end––a slow, money-making commodity––and within his village, that is ultimately what his existence is believed to be by all those around him. Similarly, he himself continues the train of exploitation when he finds himself in another village––here, in a position of power, he can (sexually) exert his will in a way that he was otherwise unable to.

Meditative and purposeful, the pace of Noen's film is laggard in its first half, but not to a fault. It demands patience and a critical eye, as the switch from monochrome to full colour is accompanied by a change of pace in the second half of the film. I see this second portion as the post-mythology phase of the cultural narrative that Noen has presented viewers with––how a society adapts to imposed belief over time. Moments where Siman's gait shifts are a delight––Maryanto truly makes the character come to life, as though every fibre in his body is suddenly awakened. But these moments are not fully explained, though perhaps intending to portray that such moments awaken us from the monotony of subjected existence.

A film that speaks to the nature of self-mythologies and shared trauma, Noen's film unpacks the complexities of how we create and disseminate truth in the digital age. Shifting away from the shamans of old (as in the first half of the film) to the presence of television screens and mobile phones, we tell the stories as we see fit. As the characters all come to confront the viewers at the end of the film, breaking the fourth wall as if taunting, "do you really see me now?", the result is 106 minutes of both absurdity and melancholy in equal measure. The Science of Fictions is certainly about that––a methodical deconstruction of the narratives we tell ourselves and tell others.

The Science of Fictions just won the Silver Hanoman Award for the Asian Feature category at the Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival and will be premiering in Singapore at this year's Singapore International Film Festival in competition on November 29, 2019.

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.

This short film comes with a rude awakening - cattle surrounded by trash. In this landfill in Padang, Indonesia, cows roam around plastic trash. We have heard enough in the news about the plastic waste situation with no end in sight. Directors Lidia Afrilita and David Darmadi go a step further by bringing about an intersection between wild life, cattle in this case, with our plastic waste. The film offers a close-up view of how cows would interact with our garbage. Basically, we see them devouring plastic as if it is normal food!

In this documentary, human interactions with the cows are kept to a minimum, forcing us to enter their world and reflect how our disposable culture is impacting other sentient beings around us. Long takes on ingestion movements also allow us to meditate on this frightening situation in the ecological food chain.

The film was released in April 2019 and has been travelling to film festivals such as Vision Du Reel and Sheffield Documentary Film Festival. It just won the Blencong Film Student Award at the 14th Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival in Yogyakarta and is currently screening at the Singapore International Film Festival.

Here is our interview with one of the directors of the film, Lidia Afrilita.

How did you deal with watching the cattle digest plastic waste while making this film?

It was a shocking experience of course considering how much we ourselves as individual, and our local community consume beef daily, then watching the our-to-be beef digesting plastic.

This film was made in conjunction with the Environmental Council of Padang. How was the collaboration like? Did you have a free hand in making this documentary?

We secured location access from the Environmental council in Padang because at first we didn't intend to make a film about garbage-eating cows. We intended to make videos about scavengers and landfill itself. So, this is nothing like collaboration with the department, but more of location access.

How long did the filming take place and what were the main challenges faced in making this?

In total including research and observation, we have come back and forth to this place for about 1.5 year. It was pretty long because in this film we were trying to capture moments. We cant direct the cows to do what we expect, so the only think we can do is to come back and see if we are lucky to find exciting moments. This is mostly the challenge that we faced. We wanted to make a 24-hour life cycle, so the cycle of the day hour by hour has to be clear in the film, the time flow should be continuum and the transition of time should be clear as if the whole film is taken in 1 day. For example one day we came to the site to capture cows' eating activity at 10 am. The next morning if we want to capture the same activity, we had to check on if the ambiance is similar to yesterday, if the weather is similar to yesterday. Things like that. We have whole lots of footage and what we have now in the film is the strongest moments we succeed to capture during this 1.5 years.

What is your take on plastic waste on animals and plants?

We are now developing a feature length documentary that focuses on the massive use of plastic in Indonesia and its impact on human's food chain, hoping that the film could help improving the awareness of Indonesian people (in particular) that the plastic waste we produce, when they impact animals and plants, it eventually will impact us too.

Do you believe we will reach a state where people will go through what the cattle in this film, or many animals and plants now, are going through; living through garbage?

I guess we are on heading to that now that there is a research found human feces contains micro plastic. The meat we eat, the salt we eat, the fish we consume, and most recent finding in Indonesia, the egg we eat are also contaminated.

Also, as much as how importance is the issue on plastic waste portrayed in this film, we want to emphasise that this film portrays the life of cows as it is, not from human's interpretation, but through the cows' perspectives, not trying to humanize the cows, but seeing them as they are. We wish audience can watch this film with a reflective or meditative approach that this is one fact that shows how bad we can treat animals that are very close to our life.

Interview by Varun Naidu

In the last decade, hardly any Singaporean director has gained more worldwide recognition and critical acclaim than writer director Anthony Chen. In 2013, Chen made history when he won the coveted Camera d’Or at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, becoming the first Singaporean to win an award for a feature film at the festival.

Closer to home, the film went on to win 4 awards at the Golden Horse Awards, including Best Feature Film and Best New Director, beating out the likes of Wong Kar-wai and Jia Zhangke. At the time, Chen was merely 29 years of age. Given its widespread critical acclaim, Ilo Ilo left many itching to see what the young director would do next.

Now, after a 6 year hiatus, Chen makes his long awaited return with his sophomore feature, Wet Season 《热带雨》. After premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the film has made its way across the world, bagging award after award at various film festivals. Last week, Chen brought his film home, with its premiere at the Capitol theatre opening the 30th Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF).

Ilo Ilo alums, Yeo Yann Yann and Koh Jia Ler make notable returns. Yeo’s role in this film is a far cry from the temperamental mother she played in Ilo Ilo. Here, she plays a gentle-hearted Malaysian Chinese language teacher, Ling, whose crumbling marriage at home can only be matched by the ostracisation she faces in school. Koh plays her student, Wei Lun, with whom she develops a close bond over the course of the film.

Yeo and Kohs’ respective portrayals of a repressed teacher and her deeply infatuated student is nothing short of stellar. More recently, both actors garnered nominations for their performances at this year’s Golden Horse Awards, with Yeo winning Best Actress –– a remarkable follow up to her Best Supporting Actress win for Ilo Ilo 6 years ago.

In school, the subject Ling teaches is constantly sidelined by a system which only pretends to take it seriously. At home, she balances her time between caring for her ailing Father-in-law and hopelessly trying to reconnect with her husband, Andrew, as played by Christopher Lee Ming-Shun. After 8 years of marriage, Ling clings on to the hope that conceiving a child would save their relationship. The substitute is her bedridden Father-in-law, played with brilliant nuance by theatre veteran Yang Shi Bin. Ling tends to him much like she would an infant. In one of the most literal comparisons, she fantasises a child taking his place on a deathbed that so closely resembles a cot.

Yet, the role the Father-in-law plays as a surrogate child in Ling and Andrews’ marriage is more of a lifeline than a saviour. In the few interactions Ling has with her husband, they almost always discuss their shared care for him. Without him, they would have no other excuse to remain together. Thus, the film cleverly posits the question as to whether having a child in an otherwise loveless relationship is truly worth doing.

Ling also wrestles between a Singapore identity and her native Malaysian one. She yearns for home, which in the film, is in the midst of violent protests in view of the forthcoming election. Her duty to her family fuels her inability to return, along with feelings of displacement and disconnect from her present surroundings.

Consequently, Singapore is presented as stagnant and cold, with a composition overwhelmed with mellow hues of blue, green and grey. Chen paints the country as an almost surgical setting, populated with hostile city goers who constantly place Ling in their crosshairs. Even the intimate act of conceiving a child is reduced to an In vitro fertilisation (IVF) procedure. Whenever characters are not being hostile, they compensate by being socially and emotionally distant.

Oddly enough, those closest to Ling are often the most distant. Her husband, Andrew, would sooner spend his time drinking with a client than have dinner with his own father and wife. He’s framed as detached, almost robotic in his interactions –– the product of a system driven by progress. The same could be said for the school principal and chemistry teacher whom Ling frequents. Between their superficial words of concern, they drone on about personal success, job promotions and money. While these insecurities are played for humour, it’s hard to deny that they are strikingly Singaporean. Perhaps these characters are Chen’s satirical way of capturing the Bourgeoisie that most of us cling so desperately to.

Ling’s feelings of displacement are mirrored by Wei Lun’s disconnect from his family and peers. In school, he’s the subject of bullying and harassment. At home, he’s alienated by his parents, who are always overseas for weeks on end. Whether he’s participating in a Wushu championship, or going to the hospital, they are never seen. Even in Wei Lun’s own home, there are more pictures of Jackie Chan than there are pictures of his own family. In fact, his parents’ indefinite absence is the very catalyst for Wei Lun’s relationship with Ling. His character is one who yearns for affirmation, and it is Ling who quickly becomes a provider.

While the city and its inhabitants are drenched in a grey gloom, Wei Lun’s boisterous charm gives Ling and her life a much needed splash of colour. He doesn’t hold back when it comes to emoting. Whether he’s upset or infatuated, Wei Lun isn’t afraid of expressing it. The way he wears his heart on his sleeve starkly contrasts Andrew, who would much rather cling onto his pride than risk being emotionally vulnerable. Interestingly, one of the only times we see colour outside the sombre monochromatic palette is when Wei Lun dons his bold, red Wushu attire.

In the end, I chose not to see this as a romantic narrative as many viewers have already postulated. I'd argue that Wei Lun ultimately realises that Ling is not so much a romantic partner as she is a surrogate parent. As for Ling, her journey leads her to the disillusionment of the Singapore dream, and the realisation that her capacity to be a mother is not determined by her ability to birth a child.

At a recent Q and A session at a screening for Ilo Ilo, Chen expressed his hope for Singaporeans to be more empathetic and compassionate, especially towards one another. Between his two feature films, I believe Wet Season 《热带雨》is his most vocal materialisation of this hope. Perhaps this film is a warning for how disconnected we’ve become in the pursuit of personal success. Or perhaps this is Chen’s rallying cry for us to be less of a stranger in our own home. Regardless, if a 40 year old Chinese teacher and her teenage student can reconnect in the midst of their personal wet seasons, then so can we.

Bold, enlightening, and thematically rich, Chen’s intimate portrayal of this unorthodox relationship truly speaks volumes for our innate desire to feel belonged and validated in an otherwise cold and despondent city.

Review by Charlie Chua

Wet Season will be released islandwide in Singapore on 28 November 2019. Go catch it!

Few names possess as much ubiquity as “Mary”. Connotations range from the Virgin to the starring figure of varying nursery rhymes to even a popular cocktail beverage.

Perhaps taking his cue from the multitude of meanings behind this name, director Nelson Yeo splices footage from two classic films with his own material to produce a hallucinatory, dream-fevered story about a girl named Ma Li in Mary, Mary, So Contrary (2019). Haunted by a lamb she lost to the herd when she was young, Ma Li eventually grows up and enters a world in which she must lose herself to regain her identity.

Yeo’s flair for matching frames to the emotional modulations of his voiceover narrative permits the audience a gripping and sensational ride. I do not mean to evoke "sensational" facetiously, but simply in the manner of fully immersing one’s senses in the experience.

Part of this trick plays out in his visual manipulation of pre-existing footage. Drawn from Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town (1948) and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), the scenes he excises from their original renditions are variously duplicated, warped and overlaid with primary colours. By displacing these once familiar moments and inscribing new visual meaning upon them, even audiences well-acquainted with the original works can be persuaded of Yeo’s endeavour to reclaim these figures.

Another aspect of the film that gestures towards the visceral is, put very simply, its sound. Filmmakers often make the mistake of employing voiceover narratives like crutches, which distract rather than support, but the voice actors in Mary help transform the space within its brief universe into an auditory chamber. Their words, intoned so deliberately as to become mere sound, therefore transgress the boundary between sense-making and sound-emitting. If one watches the film consciously withdrawn from the process of linguistic understanding, the lines may even blend seamlessly into the shrill and wispy overall sound design. Through this set-up, one is easily transported into that state of ethereality Yeo demands from his audience.

His camera—which can equally be said to be not-his—also perspicaciously maintains its portrayal of Ma Li/Mary’s interiority while working within the limits of his source material. Part of this strength stems from Yeo’s sincere narrative. No doubt it borders on being inaccessible, particularly for audiences who don’t take too well to stylised philosophical meanderings, but his story is otherwise absent of pretensions. It is a visually arresting piece that embellishes itself only to up the ante on what you see, and not because Yeo considers the source material lacking. Mary is wholly, entirely and truly about Ma Li’s crippling existential anxieties. Anyone who tells you otherwise wasn’t paying attention.

Finally, the writing. Another moment worth celebrating is the clever references to Zhuangzi’s parable of the butterfly dream. It is not brought on as a convenient way to excuse itself from its own shortcomings; rather, because the reference takes root in the short film, it allows Mary to transcend its limits. Is Ma Li or isn’t Ma Li? Is she Mary? Who is and what does it mean to be? These are questions the short film toys with and stops short of providing answers to—other than to insinuate that if you look hard enough, you will eventually find what you seek.

When talking to funny people, it tends to be a natural human reaction that one feels conscious not to make the conversation boring. If you have watched the works of Thai filmmaker Sorayos Prapapan, you would know that he gives a good name and an intellectual ring to the idea of mischief. His films are funny no doubt, but beneath the humour is something quite critical about the larger Thai society. There is something about the underclass in Boonrerm, something about bureaucracy in Aunite Maam has never had a passport and something about the industry in the hilarious Death of a Soundman. But all couched in something LOL. Face and face, one-on-one with Sorayos, or Yossy as many filmmakers would affectionately call him, one gets to see a more serious and opinionated side of him. Which is why our conversation with Yossy began with politics. Jeremy: Do politics interest you a lot?

Sorayos: The year I graduated was the year Thai politics became very violent. I was looking for work and money but it was super hard. Even harder for a filmmaker. So it made me interested in politics. In fact, it was my good friend who led me on. I come from a middle class family and most middle class people are ignorant about politics and my good friend comes from a lower income family. He opened my eyes to what was not fair in society, how the lower classes are being taken advantage of by middle class families. He asked if I thought the protests were wrong or right? I thought they were wrong but he said they were right and I asked him to share more.

Jeremy: Had you already started making films then?

Sorayos: Yes, but I was more interested in making rom-coms, love stories.

Jeremy: When did you make your first film?

Sorayos: 19. I am thirty three now, so it was about 14 years ago. I was a freshman then and I was studying mass communications. I didn’t need to pick my speciality yet until the third year. So I didn’t know where I wanted to go yet but I thought I wanted to be in TV production because I like to watch comedy on TV. Then when I got it, one of the senior guys was a making a film and asked us to help him on set. And it made me want to make one myself too. I didn’t know if I would like the process, but I just wanted to make one. And I like the feeling when I copy my DVDs and pass it to others and ask them to watch my film.

Jeremy: So you made a string of comedies and rom-coms. When did you start making your more serious films?

Sorayos: When I graduated. Apichatpong (Weerasethakul) had a film called Syndromes and A Century. When I was in my third year, one of my teachers recommended us to go to the Alliance Francaise to watch this film by Apichatpong. When I watched it, I thought that it opened another film dimension to me. I did not get all of it but I enjoyed watching it.

Jeremy: You also worked on his set for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recalls His Past Lives, didn’t you? Do you think he was a great influence on you?

Sorayos: Could be. But not just in film. He has done interviews in which he dared to speak about politics. He is quite radical but he knows how to make it subtle too.

Jeremy: Who else has been an influence in your films?

Sorayos: Kongdej Jaturanrasamee. He is an actor, screenwriter and film director. He starred in some commercial films and then later in his career, he started making indie films like PO47, Tang Wong, Where We Belong. (pause) Very often, it is not about the film first but about the filmmaker. Also, as a beginner, you tend to try to copy someone. So watching some of these films, I thought ‘Hey, you can have just two persons talking to each other and it can become a film!’. And I thought to myself that I could see myself making these types of films.

Jeremy: Many of your short films feature two people talking actually!

Sorayos: Maybe it is because I am realistic. I am a director, producer and a sound guy and I have only two levellers. So if I keep it at two characters, I don’t need to rent more. (Laughs)

Jeremy: That explains a lot!

Sorayos: It is easier to direct.

Jeremy: And do you often use the same actors? I notice you work with the lady in Auntie Maam a lot.

Sorayos: She is in everyone’s films. Anocha Suwichakornpong, Aditya Assarat etc. She is well known among us filmmakers but I was the first one to use her actual name in the film - Auntie Maam. So people now know her as Maam.

Jeremy: When you made Auntie Maam does not have a passport then, between the two of you, who was more famous?

Sorayos: She was more famous. Famous within the independent film scene.

Jeremy: While you say you are influenced by many other Thai filmmakers out there. But you always manage to inject something different in the way you make them. Mostly humour. It’s a humour that reminds me of the strain seen in Mary is Happy, Mary is Happy. A deadpan kind of humour. So do people compare you to Thai directors like Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit?

Sorayos: Some people called me post-Nawapol.

Jeremy: Who did?

Sorayos: Some of my friends.

But to be fair, Nawapol is post-Roy Anderesen. So I can be post-Nawapol, but he is post-Roy Andersen.

Jeremy: But I also notice a lot of this deadpan humour in many Thai independent films. Another example is Tulapop Saenjaroen’s A Room with a Coconut View. The humour is very similar. Can you comment on that? Is this something to do with Thai culture?

Sorayos: Yes, I think so. We cannot be serious longer than two minutes. We have to make one joke before we can go on.

Jeremy: You are absolutely right!

Sorayos: And also, Tulapop and I have been friends since six-years old. We were in the same school all the way till we graduated. Then, he went to Chicago to study film. He made his first film when he was 15. I remember that even though I was not involved in that film. And after he found out that I was studying film, he got me to meet filmmakers like Anocha. I attended their workshops and soon got to know more filmmakers in the community like Aditya Assarat, Lee Chatametikool, And like what I said about knowing the filmmaker first, knowing these people led me to watch their films and observe their styles. And all these started with Tulapop.

Jeremy: Your films always manage to find a sweet spot between the funny and the political. Just like using the American flag to make the sound of a the Thai flag billowing in the wind in Death of a Soundman. How do you think of ideas like that?

Sorayos: I dunno. I guess I tell myself if you want to make a good film, you need a good ending. And if you want to make a comedy, you need to end with a good joke. As for the flag, we actually played with many alternative ideas before arriving at the American flag. At one point, I thought why not an LGBT flag. Then I thought, it may make some groups of people very angry and they are quite vocal about it. Then the other flag I thought of using was China’s flag. That could be quite funny. But then, I felt some people may end up thinking it becomes a bit racist. The American flag was a safe option.

Death of a Soundman

Jeremy: That’s funny. That the American flag is safe to joke about (laughs)

Sorayos: Also, some ignorant people may not know what the China flag looks like but everyone should know what the American flag looks like. So, basically, the joke came first, then the politics.

Jeremy: But to come up with all these political jokes, I guess you read a lot of news?

Sorayos: Not really. I read the headlines. I am not an information guy.

Jeremy: Oh really. Actually I was going to ask about some of your political views. What’s your view on the Hong Kong protests?

Sorayos: I think I want to support the protestors. I think the China government is too powerful.

Jeremy: Have you taken part in a protest before? For instance, the 2014 protests in Thailand.

Sorayos: No, I was against the protests. 2014 was a middle class protest against Yingluck. I am on Yingluck side. Those people felt Yingluck’s family was corrupt and just wanted to get rid of them at any cost. And they would rather see the military in power than Yingluck in power. They may say Yingluck is corrupt, but with the military, we see a different kind of corruption. But a lot of them don’t pay attention, mainly because they are middle-class and comfortable.

Jeremy: And with the military rule over the last few years, what’s the state of censorship in Thailand?

Sorayos: Don’t even talk about censorship, I think things in general have become less free. People around you will tell you you cannot say this or that, or they will report you to the military camp. [to confirm]. Some people have already sought asylum in France.

Jeremy: Have your films been censored before?

Sorayos: I have only made short films and they don’t censor short films. You only need to submit your films to the censorship board if you plan to release the film to the general public. Or if your film gets accepted into an overseas film festival and you want sponsorship from the government for the flight, then they need to see the film.

Jeremy: What kind of content usually gets censored in Thailand? Take out content about the royalty, because I know that will get the film banned.

Sorayos: Weird sex? Like father doing it to the son. Hardcore sex….. Monks doing something. By the way, monks cannot be seen to cry on the street. I don’t know why. This happened to a commercial film.

Jeremy: Can a policeman be seen to cry, like in Aditya Assarat’s segment in 10 Years Thailand?

Sorayos: Yes. (laughs)

Jeremy: I feel if they do a version 2.0 of 10 Years Thailand, you should be inside. If given the chance to do, what would it be about? Off the top of your head.

Sorayos: I may make a segment called Game of Thrones.

Jeremy: Why?

Sorayos: Because I like Game of Thrones series. I won’t explain why.

Jeremy: Moving on, in the world of politics, do you think you are more an observer or do you actually take part in it?

Sorayos: I used to be more active. I would try to influence the people around to vote for this party and not that party. Now, I have toned down, and I like to spend more time on my life and my film will do that duty for me.

Jeremy: In your other profession as a sound guy, how is the industry like in Thailand?

Sorayos: For the independent films, we have mostly four to five people rotating around the different productions. In the actual film industry, there are maybe 100-200.

Jeremy: What made you interested in doing sound?

Sorayos: Because of indie films. If you watch indie films and listen carefully, they are very different from commercial films. And I enjoy listening to the sound design. Also, since there are not that many soundmen, there were less competitors when I started out.

Jeremy: What do you think is the most surprising aspect of your character that very few people know about? Maybe only your close friends or your mother knows?

Sorayos: I am a sensitive person. I have gone to watch some Iranian movie with some friends and during the movie I cried and my friends were surprised. They go like ‘You can cry?’ They don’t think I can have that kind of emotion. They don’t know I can cry a lot.

Jeremy: But do you like to make films that make people cry?

Sorayos: You should watch my latest short film Dossier of the Dossier.

Dossier of the Dossier

Sorayos is an award-winning filmmaker whose short films have travelled far. Death of a Soundman was nominated for the Orizzonti award at the Venice International Film Festival in 2017 and won Best Southeast Asian Short Film at the 2017 Singapore International Film Festival. He was the Filmmaker in Focus as the 2019 SeaShorts Film Festival. He is currently working on raising funds for his first feature film ‘Armold is a Model Student’ which is about a high-school student in Bangkok whose perception of morality is change forever after being involved in cheating.

This project just received the Southeast Asia Co-Production Grant by the Singapore Film Commission, being one of eight film projects awarded the inaugural grant from 26 applications. He will receive up to S$250,000 in funding for the production. The film will be produced by Tan Si En, Anthony Chen (Giraffe Pictures) and Donsaron Kovitcanitcha.

Sorayos Prapapan worked as a production assistant for Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. He attended workshops such as Generation Campus 2013, Asian Film Academy 2013. His short film Boonrerm (2013) has been screened at more than 30 international film festival including International Film Festival Rotterdam. His short film Auntie Maam Has Never Had a Passport (2014) was screened in International Film Festival Rotterdam 2015.

Interview by Jeremy Sing

Tan Wei Ting’s Still Standing tells the story behind the construction and attempted conservation of Singapore’s iconic Pearl Bank Apartments. Built in 1976, and the subject of multiple en-bloc attempts, the residential building is currently slated for demolition. The short film had its world premiere at this year’s Singapore International Film Festival, as part of the Singapore Panorama programme.

Tan's Pearl Bank Apartments is a warm and homely place. Neighbours know each other. They trade recipes and chatter. In the words of young Tan Cheng Siong (Darren Guo), the architect, it is a “high-rise kampung”.

Tan Cheng Siong is the hero of the film. He remains unbent and idealistic throughout the years, both against a naysaying boss who saw no possibility of realising his proposed design of the apartments, and in his old age (Allan Wong), against the ambitions of Alex Poh the speculator. I liked the older Mr Tan’s proposal of applying to the Urban Redevelopment Authority for plot ratio adjustments in order to preserve the building. Addressing the residents of Pearl Bank Apartments, his voice was quiet and tireless. Very realistic, and very Singaporean.

In a world where things can be made and unmade very quickly, the physical uniqueness of Pearl Bank Apartments didn't come across to me. I’ve seen CapitaLand's One Pearl Bank and there is a clear reference to its predecessor. What made Pearl Bank Apartments irreplaceable? I wanted to see more of the building itself. What happened during mealtimes? Where did children play? Where was everyone's favourite nook and cranny? In other words, I wished I heard more from the building, than from talk about it.

Nonetheless, Tan created a sense of community within a very short space. Though we know very little about the characters in Still Standing, that they came together as a group was clear. They were at home in the unit where they gathered. The palette of the film was less lively, but a reminder that the characters’ struggles had passed.

Singaporeans with fond memories of Pearl Bank Apartments might take comfort in its preservation on film. Still Standing is one record of the things we lose and cherish as the nation pushes ahead.

Written by Teenli Tan

The 30th Singapore International Film Festival announced the winners of its Silver Screen Awards today, celebrating the best of filmmaking in the region. Scales (Sayidat Al Bahr) by Saudi Arabian filmmaker, Shahad Ameen, emerged as the Best Film under the Asian Feature Film Competition segment, which saw eight other shortlisted feature films in the race for the coveted award. Ameen’s debut feature tells a stunning mythical tale of a young girl who defies her village’s harsh and chauvinistic traditions to prove her worth, putting forth a strong statement about female empowerment through the lens of a modern Saudi woman. The jury found it to be a “very original and strong film from a first-time filmmaker who speaks about patriarchy with the simplicity of a fable.”

The late Filipino actor, Kristoffer King, was conferred the Best Performance award for his role as Dante, a small-time petty crook in Filipino director Raymund Ribay Gutierrez’s film, Verdict. Taking on the role of a pathological abuser, the jury felt that King’s character “could easily lapse into caricature, but his nuanced, outstanding, performance provided insight into the mind of a perpetrator.” King’s participation inVerdict also marked the talented actor’s final role in a feature film.

Israeli-born filmmaker, Oren Gerner, received the accolade as Best Directorfor his film, Africa, a docu-fictional study of wounded masculinity and the anxiety of ageing. The jury shared that “one of the most difficult challenges for a director is to film the story of his own family.” However, Gerner was “courageous in casting his real-life family members to portray this story that is so close to his own life. Though they are non-actors, they manage to convey a sense of naturalness with subtle emotions. This fine acting speaks to the tremendous talent of the director.”

Passed by Censorby Turkish director, Serhat Karaaslan, which follows the story of a prison guard whose boundary between fiction and reality becomes blurred as he sets off to uncover a domestic conspiracy, was given the Special Mention of the evening for its “engaging screenplay.”

The winners of the Asian Feature Film Competition were decided by a jury panel, headed by award-winning Indian filmmaker, Anurag Kashyap, who co-directed crime thriller and India’s first Netflix Originals series Sacred Games. Joining him on the jury are well-versed Malaysian movie producer, Amir Muhammad, veteran Hong Kong filmmaker Pang Ho-cheung, and award-winning Indonesian filmmaker Nia Dinata.

For the Southeast Asian Short Film Competition, I’m Not Your F***ing Stereotype, by Thai filmmaker, Hesome Chemamah, was awarded the Best Southeast Asian Short Film out of the 18 shortlisted titles. The short delves into the life of a Muslim girl from Southern Thailand, who falls prey to racism in school and spirals into an identity crisis. The jury was blown away by the film where “everything felt right and new and like no one had told this director or cinematographer or editor or actors or anyone what they shouldn’t do.”

Burmese filmmaker, Zaw Bo Bo Hein (pictured below), took home the Best Director accolade for his short, Sick, which illustrates the predicament of a man’s desperate search for money to settle the hefty hospital bills of his friend who is losing the will to live. The jury shared that the film showcased the quality of great directors with its ability to “combine a clear plan with perfect execution and not lose the tone.”

Competing against three other local talents, Singaporean filmmaker, Shoki Lin stood out and clinched the Best Singapore Short Film for his film, Adam .The jury felt that this short on family and identity is an “exceptional film that reveals many deeper layers with an emotional dark rollercoaster through Adam’s journey.” It is also a “local story clearly elevated that will resonate with an international audience.”

California Dreaming (Soben California) by Cambodian director, Sreylin Meas, received the Special Mention. Telling a story of two women from different backgrounds and their encounters at an oceanfront resort, the jury felt that the short is “fluid and lyrical”, “ deceptively simple yet so layered” and “succeeded in creating a special moment between strangers.” It is also this “unique female perspective that makes it so universal.” Narrowing down to its technique, the panel also commended the film for its “excellent cinematography, acting and direction.”

The Southeast Asian Short Film Competition Jury Panel this year was led by award-winning filmmaker Dito Montiel, together with renowned Filipino filmmaker Monster Jimenez and one of Singapore’s pioneer film and television music composers, Joe Ng.

Sweet, Salty (Ngot, Man) by Vietnamese filmmaker, Duong Dieu Linh, received theYouth Jury Prize after the deliberation by 15 jurors of SGIFF’s Youth Jury & Critics Programme, who saw the film as a “bittersweet negotiation of womanhood in 21st-century Vietnam.”

Paying tribute to the master of Japanese cult cinema, veteran Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike was conferred the Honorary Award, which recognises individuals who have made exceptional and enduring contributions to Asian cinema. Having directed over 100 films, he was 4 known for his unique, eclectic and irreverent genre-bending aesthetics that is innovative and uncompromising.

Leading Chinese actress, Yao Chen, was also honoured with the refreshed Cinema Icon Award, for her inspiring achievements as a creative force in film. She received the award from Chairman of SGIFF, Sebastian Tan.

Singaporean director, Tan Siyou (pictured above), received the Most Promising Project of the Southeast Asian Film Lab for her film, Amoeba, which was commended for its “relevance to contemporary themes prevalent amongst the youth in Singapore” and the “fresh perspective of one's journey to self-discovery.” Filipino director, Kristin Parreno Barrameda was also awarded the Residency Prize for her film, Bing.Bong.Bang, “which stood out for its ironic voice on the dichotomy of life and death” and her ability to provide a “fresh and unique perspective on otherwise universal themes.”

Lee Sze Wei from Nanyang Technological University was presented with the Youth Critic Award that acknowledges the contributions of young writers to the film landscape.

I am, in the most honest sense, slightly afraid of what I will have to say about Sunday. Not because I can’t bring myself to say anything about it, but because it feels like it is trying to say something very specific which I, for some reason, can’t quite identify. Maybe this is because of my lack of life experience, because Sunday feels like it is capturing a moment beyond my own lexicon and it left me slightly perplexed. Or maybe it is because Sunday feels like someone else’s nightmare from the distant past. It really does.

Sunday feels like it is somebody else’s subconscious memory materializing and I am intruding on their experience by watching it unfold. And this could, potentially, have prevented me from taking it in completely. It has this bizarre sense of being both timeless and very much from a specific time period. Everything is colored in a brownish pink hue and the characters are given names in the credits, but these names are barely spoken out loud. Almost as if they were forgotten, or some sort of afterthought to the people they belonged to. The aspect ratio seems to allude to a different time, as does the furniture and the physical world these characters inhabit.

Kris Ong is the director and writer of this short and it feels very personal and slightly revealing. However, in specifically what way is difficult for me to determine. The main character seems to be conflicted in more ways than shown and the short only captures a moment of particularly prominent discourse. The motives of each character seem vague and unclear, as if they are not proactively acting within this world, but just reacting to it’s stimuli. And maybe that is a much more truthful depiction of what most people are actually like.

In most movies, characters tend to have an almost absolute impact on the world around them. In Sunday, the characters seem as inconsequential to the outside world as much as anyone in the real world watching the short. Ong does not create characters who proclaim, in any way, shape, or form, that they are more important or special than anybody else. They are dealing with their own demons in their own way and whatever impact it has on their peripheral does not seem to be on their minds. Each of the characters in Sunday have some sort of physical ailment.

The main character has a full body rash which peeks out from her clothes and covers her neck. Her sister’s boyfriend has an injured leg and needs crutches to move around. And there is an elderly character in one of the back rooms of the HDB who has a mystery illness and needs life support to stay alive. Are these afflictions metaphors for something? I can’t tell. If they are personal, they are too secretive to give any real insight. If they are political, I might just be too naive to understand them. But the fact that each character is suffering from something is very curious.

Everyone has some sort of baggage, and whether or not you can deal with it depends on who you are. The woman is characterized as timid and shy, and could be the kind of person who tries to avoid conflict by never really admitting what is going on in her head. She has approachable, girl-next-door sort of looks, with kind eyes but a nervous smile. The man’s torso is covered is different styles of tattoos, some highly intricate and some plain lines and he looks like a stereotypical “bad boy with a soft side”. He might have been intimidating, but delegated to the couch and crutches, he looks painfully frail.

Their interactions throughout the short are puzzling. Not once can I find a motive behind their actions, a reason why they are entertaining their ideas, or a good explanation for engaging in oral sex. Maybe it is the mundane or weary setting which surrounds them. That could explain the tendency towards violence, a way to feel something other than numbness. Or it could be the exact opposite, the violence being a defense mechanism from the overload of stimuli that the woman is faced with.

And, to be truly sincere, that might have been what I liked most about Sunday. Ong does not stuff some sort of didactic message down the audience’s throat, but does not create something that has illogical form and, worse, doesn’t engage. Of course, stories with highly prevalent and obvious meaning will always have a place in the cinematic vocabulary. But to have a space, even just for 17 minutes, which allows for meaningful ambiguity is equally important.

Sunday by Kris Ong was in competition in the Singapore International Film Festival Southeast Asian Short Film Competition.

Review by Valerie Tan

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Review: Sunday (2019) @ SGIFF