The
line-up this weekend includes latest works from Ho Tzu Nyen, Sanif Olek and Kan
Lume, last year’s winner of the Best Singapore Short Film at the Silver Screen
Awards of SGIFF, ‘My Father After Dinner’ by Gladys Ng, as well other
selections from last year’s SGIFF.
Check out the line-up here:
15 October
October Cherries by Christie Amanda Rodrigues (pictured right)
Did you know that there was an independent local band called the October Cherries in the 1960s? they were hugely popularly in Belgium and the Netherlands, but never quite found their face base back home. The film captures the band members, now in their 60’s, looking back at their careers with equal fondness and partiality. The short is directed by Christie Rodrigues.
In the Still of the Night by Sanif Olek
Sanif Olek’s film, In
The Still of the Night, was commissioned by the National Gallery Singapore,
and pays homage to the classic, post-war Nusantara-Malay films in Southeast
Asia where films by legendary Malay auteurs such as P. Ramlee and Hussin Hanif
made their mark in colonial Singapore and Malaysia. Shifting through time
lapses, the film stretches a simple premise into a more complex tale of
longing, discover and second changes. Sanif is no stranger to the local silver
screen, and had in fact, had his film, Sayang Disayang selected to
represent Singapore in the Best Foreign Picture category at the Academy awards.
He has also premiered films at the SGIFF.
Void Deck Love Story by Matthew
Foo (pictured below left)
Matthew Foo’s Void
Deck Love Story strives to capture the shared moments that most
Singaporeans have with the common shared space in the HDB flats, through a
series of whimsical encounters. Matthew is a student from School of The Arts
(SOTA), and will be premiering his short film at the Singapore Short Cuts.
My Father After Dinner by Gladys
Ng (pictured right)
I’m sure you’re no
stranger to this film. This film was presented at the Singapore International
Film Festival in 2015, and bagged the Best Singaporean Short Film Award.
Audiences who are excited to watch Gladys’ newly commissioned short, and who
were unable to watch My Father After Dinner previously, can now do so at
the Singapore Short Cuts. Gladys’ graduation short film, Ying & Summer, was
also first presented at the 9th Singapore Short Cuts in 2012.
16 October
The Nameless by Ho Tzu Nyen (pictured below left)
This film selects
approcate scenes from 16 different films featuring Hong Kong actor Tony Leung
Chiu-wai, and are reordered and re-contextualized to create a meta-narrative of
Lai Teck, a real life triple agent operating in post-war Malaya. This film
unearths the life of Lai Teck, as a Secretary General of the Malayan Communist
Party between 1939 and 1946. Even his real name is a matter for debate as he
had 50 other alias. Yet he played a key role in post-war Malaya as a triple
agent, working first for the French and British secret forces, and then with
the Japanese Kempeitai during the years of the Malayan Occupation.
For We Are Strangers by Nicole
Midori Woodford
Nicole is considered
an up and coming female voice in the film industry. Her film, For We Are
Strangers, dwells into the psyche of a prision counsellor, Xuan, who slowly
succumbs to the trauma of her past after being assigned to the same man who
assaulted her in the past. In prison for a minor felony, the inmate is due for
parole. Xuan is left to grapple with issues of morality and retribution. Nicole
offers a naturalistic, low-key but dramatically compelling account of the
assailant-victim quandary though her short film. The short film competed at the
Singapore Screen Awards at the SGIFF last year. It also made its world premiere
at the 20th Busan Film Festival, and competed for the Wide Angle
Short Film Competition for the Sonje Award in 2015.
Story of a Singaporean Face by
Kan Lume and Megan Wonowidjoyo
The short film
captures the moment to moment Singaporean zeitgeist in fluid stop-motion
sequences rendered in impressionistic pencil drawings. Over 1,000 hand-drawn
portraits of real-life MRT commuters were used to create a tapestry of faces
that eventually metamorphoses into a singular presence as the short film
progresses to reveal a multi-dimensional gaze into the Singaporean identity.
This film was also commissioned by National Gallery Singapore.
Three the Peehood by Kapie Eipak
Kapie Eipak’s Three
The Peehood carries on the legacy of Georges Melies whimsical anarchism,
and challenges representations of non-conformity. The film is a hypnotic blend
of Bill Plympton style animation, with a Kafkaesque existential dilemma. The
film subverts society’s repressive conformity in a parade of the ordinary that
spirals into a vortex of the absurd. Kapie experiments in various styles
ranging from illustration to animation, photography and graphic design.
Ways of Seeing by Jerrold Chong (pictured below left)
Ways of Seeing
premiered at the 26th SGIFF but did you know, that director Jerrold
Chong went on to intern as a CGI artist for the acclaimed stop-motion
claymation film, Anomalisa? Fans of the movie can have a chance to catch
Jerrold’s most recent independent work, Ways of Seeing at the Singapore
Short Cuts. The film follows two visually impaired strangers and the
connections made between them as they experience the world through other
senses.