Being, as a Horse by Mark Chua
22
October
Being, as a Horse by Mark Chua
Being, as a Horse is a whimsical take on the nature of personal freedom
performed by two men with horses as heads. Mark Chua’s film is an ambitious
attempt to encapsulate complex philosophical ideas resulting in an intoxicating
experience that confounds as much as it illuminates.
An Autumn Afternoon by Lei Yuan Bin
An Autumn Afternoon modestly documents, an autumn afternoon visiting
master Japanese film director Ozu Yasujiro’s grave in Kita-Kamakura, Kanagawa
Prefecture, Japan. Methodical in his documentation, with ravishing yet simple
details, Lei Yuan Bin has created a pean to Ozu himself, utilising much of the
same trademark rigorous style of static shots that capture moments of
transcendence in places and everyday objects. A simple day out in the crisp
autumn air is conveyed with equal parts economy and poetry.
Silent Light by Liao
Jiekai
Silent Light is part of Liao Jiekai’s series of short films that
continues to defy traditional narrative structures and his profound
contemplation of the material nature of celluloid-based cinema. An
intoxicating cocktail of found footage and home movie aesthetics, Silent
Light dwells deep into the psyche of a restless filmmaker in love with
the material world of cinema.
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The Sarkais by Joshua Lau
A joint meditation on dreams
and personal identity by Joshua Lau and his fellow schoolmates at School of
the Arts (SOTA), Shirin Keshvani and Alexis Sng, The
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Sarkais
unfolds with diary-like confessions spoken over images of seemingly random
order, interspersed with found footage from home videos. The filmmakers
gently invite viewers into a mystery where the answer serves no purpose other
than a thematic lynchpin. Like its cryptic title, the heart of the short film
remains a delicate enigma not to be unravelled but savoured.
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 5 Dollars of a Passport by
Jason Ye
In 5
Dollars for a Passport, filmmaker Jason Ye sets out on a journey across the
Causeway to find out about his father’s past in a tiny shophouse in Labis,
Johor. As Ye forges deeper into his family history, questions of identity and
nationhood surface. Despite its conventional structure, the short film
succeeds through its sincerity. Moments of connection between family members
are rendered without frills, giving the scenes weight and integrity. The most
striking feature of 5 Dollars for a Passport is the cinematography. Shot on
16mm film stock, the film captures a lost past hidden in the present.
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Untitled by Terry Ong
Filmmaker
Terry Ong has been making series of experimental short films over the past
few years. Untitled is the latest short film to explore intangible
connections between people. Ong employs a variety of video effects to create
impressionist renderings of spaces that alternate between obfuscating and
illuminating human figures within any given frame. Sequences are devoid of
audio, which serves to further accentuate the urgency of the image such that
when the dominance of silence is lifted by an occurrence of natural sound
towards the end, the film jolts into a different register, unsettling the
viewers’ notions of reality.
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Coney Island by Rashad Bin
Faizal
Of all the known islands
dotting the shoreline of Singapore, Coney Island is perhaps the least known.
Situated along the sliver of waterway separating mainland Singapore and Johor
Bahru, Coney Island has experienced a recent surge of interest due in part to
the rapid urbanisation of the Punggol area in the last ten years. It is thus
no surprise that burgeoning filmmakers, such as Rashad bin Faizal and fellow
students of SOTA (School of the Arts), would situate a film about the
shifting nature of friendship and the abandonment of youth on the island’s
characteristically remote woodlands.
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 Open Sky / 其实哪里都好 by Tan
Jingliang
Tan
Jingliang’s Open Sky alludes to a particular brand of observational
cinema that rewards due viewers’ patience. The film realises the depth of
friendship between two friends in their early twenties through their aimless
wandering among housing estates, revealing the uneasy reconciliation between
the ideals of adolescence and the realities of surviving young adulthood in
Singapore.
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Happily Ever After/ 祝你幸福 by Shan
Neo, pple Hong, Pek Hong Kun
Happily Ever After attempts to add layers of meaning to the
ubiquity of wedding photography services. In so doing, the filmmakers adopted
an ingenious methodology. Three wedding photography sessions are framed in
long shots to provide viewers with unfettered access to the dynamics of a
family. The unfurled dramas are further enriched by the sense of real time
elicited from fixed camera positions, giving way to a story told beyond the
narrative constraints normally associated with family dramas.
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 Quinn by Rave Phua
Quinn begins as most other issues-driven documentaries
would with talking heads that aim to establish the subject’s background. In
this case, the trials and tribulations of a young middle-class couple’s
decision to keep a baby in the face of uncertain financial circumstances.
However, in its unflinching sense of honesty on display in front of and
behind the camera, Quinn transcends the typical issues-driven subject
matter to reveal a truth more startling in its humanity.
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The Drawing Room &
Episode from Art Studio by Liao Jiekai
Liao Jiekai’s restless
exploration of the tangible amid the intangible continues with a loose
abstraction of Yeng Pway Ngon’s Art Studio in the form of a short
film. Yeng’s novel sought to reconcile the place of artists in Singapore
society over the span of 30 years. Liao eschews all notions of narrative
legibility to carve out his own interpretation of Yeng’s literary achievement
through two parallel yet disparate narrative trajectories: The first
trajectory follows an artist and a model in the act of creation. In the
second strain, passages from Yeng’s Art Studio are narrated to scenes
of the National Gallery Singapore’s set up of the Siapa Nama Kamu? exhibition.
The sheer disparity between these two strains sets up a dichotomy of perception
which adds depth to the short film.
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