Once in a while, I am reminded of the fact that making a documentary is more than pointing your camera at your subject as an observer. We can put colour into our observation, turning it into ‘perception’ and an ‘argument’. In the same way, documentaries can put forth a point of view even though many, fed on TV documentaries, expect it to play an encyclopedic role.
‘Finding Bukit Brown’ by Pedro Shiu is a fair attempt at
creating a documentary with some teeth. It rests somewhere on a pivoting point
between offering a non-interventionist history lesson and a call to activism to
the audience. It does a competent job of
educating the audience on the physical attributes of Bukit Brown and the
technical details of the proposed exhumation. But it also presents a singular
sentiment towards the impending fate of Bukit Brown under the government’s
hands through the interviews laden with regret as well as dropping
pro-conservation facts like Bukit Brown being the largest Chinese cemetery
outside China.
The documentary succeeds in being conscientious in its
efforts to elicit the issues and the arguments around it. It has diligently
sought opinions from the ground all the way to the top, interviewing young
visitors, an anthropologist and even Minister Tan Chuan Jin, who closes the
loop on the series of opinions, even though his comments do not close the
debate. It is also diligent in the visual portrayal, offering thoughtfully
composed shots and even the whimsical tracked and craned shots. There are
probably many Bukit Brown tribute short films and videos by now. This could be
well-positioned as one of the better ‘primer’ films out there if you are
starting from zero in your knowledge of this much-talked about place.
Review by Jeremy Sing
This film was recently screened at Substation's First Takes
This film was recently screened at Substation's First Takes
Finding Bukit Brown Trailer from pshiu on Vimeo.