Still from CASH
The conversations about motifs in Singapore independent films started approximately with film writer Ben Slater’s observant labels in his 2006 essay about Singapore cinema titled ‘Singapore Shorts DVD’. ‘Disconnected Modern Lovers’ and ‘HDB Whimsy’ were two of the terms he cooked up to denote the de rigueur cinema during those times, with the former referring to attractive leads falling in love against familiar city scapes and a Mandarin voiceover while the latter referred to stories of children or youths misunderstood by arguing parents against a HDB flat backdrop.
It’s funny how these
motifs have morphed through several iterations over the years and new twists
have emerged while some elements never seem to die. Among the new twists, some
played the ‘race’ card, exploring inter-racial relationships, while some others
waved the PG card, in which PG = Pioneer Generation. If there was one element
that never seemed to go away, it’s nostalgia. I blame Royston Tan for planting
the seeds of that and perfecting it. For a good 5-6 years, nostalgia rained on
our screens first like a soothing shower but subsequently like torrential
rains. SG50 also provided that excuse to layer that sepia filter.
This year, I agreed to
come on board as part of the pre-Jury for Singapore’s National Youth Film
Awards (NYFA). This was an exercise I was underprepared for, particularly since I was
told I had to watch close to 200 short films in order to shortlist nominees.
Not since the SIFF Singapore Shorts showcase which they used to have as a
fringe event, had I watched through so many short films at a go. Out of
prejudice, I thought I was going to sink into a kind of ‘HDB Sonata in D Minor’
zone with more families in gambling debts, kids under exam pressure or someone
reminiscing the taste of his late grandmother’s Ang Ku Kueh. I was a quarter
right. This year’s crop of entries actually reflected a bit more risk-taking and
wanderlust than I expected. Nostalgia was reduced to a whimper for once and
other material have come to the fore.
Pihoto with the Pre-Jury members (From left: Juan Foo, David Lee and myself), taken at the NYFA Awards
AI - Art of
Imagination
When you run out of
stories to tell from your four walls, you look into the fifth dimension.
Inspired by the likes of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, we are slowly
perfecting the art of marrying technology with human drama. 2.0 was a brave
attempt in imagining a world in which social media likes become currency and
popularity can buy you a fortune. The filmmakers had processed and stretched
the idea rigorously enough, imagining the pursuit of cyberspace fame in
overdrive, when a mother loses her identity to earn likes for her fame-obsessed
daughter. Jon in a box imagines a spine-tingling future in which we could
be literally wired up and controlled by larger systems. In Stealing Faces,
Singapore becomes the world’s leading nation for plastic surgery and as
anticipated, it is a story about moral dilemmas and a certain greed for beauty.
The future of AI has captured the imagination of filmmakers for a long time and
really, no one has a monopoly over what our lives would be like when AI becomes
the cerebral centre of our societal machine. With unmistakable motifs from
Spike Jonze’s HER, Something Went Wrong crammed some thriller vibes into the
constraints of a short film, depicting what happens when your smart assistant,
Laura, develops a mind of her own. The most obvious hurdle standing in the way
of choosing the science fiction genre is budget , or rather the lack of it. But
the subtler challenge in introducing technology as a character is humanising
it.
Still from Something Went Wrong
No Country for Old Men?
The following characters
are hard to direct but cinematic gold when put on screen - children, animals
and old people. To some extent, the intention of putting a microscope on their
helpless eyes, wrinkled arms, weathered faces and cranky temperament borders on
exploitative. Increasingly, every family here in Singapore will have their
share of old men problems at home, so little surprise this, and not children
refusing to study, has become the ore representative HDB drama. 像小山的大象 is a classic story of a filial
daughter struggling to take care of her father due to his Alzheimer’s disease,
with her greatest despair coming from the fact that he is starting to lose
memory of who she is. Linger features a naggy old man giving his son a dos and
don’ts lecture on consuming a durian. But there is a twist and the clue lies in
the father’s rather spacey delivery of his spiel. Hello Goodbye filled the
familiar niche of the nursing home tragedy. An old man rolls himself to his
daughter’s workplace on a wheelchair just to catch a glimpse of her. The
age-old formula of pitting old against young was used in One Hour Two Dollar,
about a latently sweet encounter between a young who wants stay overnight at
the gaming shop because he had bad grades and the owner who is a cranky old
man. Somehow this was an entry I found myself alone in my adulation of, as opposed
to other entries with unanimous love from the other jury members. I thought of all
old men, it has the most relatable old man. He wasn’t asking for
sympathy. Quite a badass at first encounter but your heart goes out to him when
the landlords come closing down his shop. Not forgetting, there was a ballsy
old male cleaner who gatecrashed a boardroom meeting in an act of protest in
Salvation, an eco-conscious entry about man versus establishment. Somewhat off
the beaten track and totally necessary.
Still from One Hour Two Dollar
Oedipal Complex
Old women were somewhat
lost in the clutter compared to old men in this year’s crop of entries. Other
than Beatrice Chien’s angry rant andbold swimsuit appearance in Joyride. Not
that there no old women stories but perhaps we have seen enough of their
prototypes - long suffering granny who is forsaken by her family or grandchild
remembering his grandmother’s (Fill in this blank with your favourite food). If
we wider our lenses a bit and look at the larger and more evergreen ‘Mother’
thematic strand, the selection is more compelling. I am personally attracted to
the works that subvert the conventional virtuous image of a mother because
mums can fight back and or go astray too. One name has emerged as a mum of a
thousand faces - Kelly Lim, who unfortunately did not qualify for the acting
awards due to her age. Kelly Lim is like the Yong Tau Foo of Singapore
independent cinema - she gives content real meat and substance and is so
‘everyday‘ in her appeal. Without noticing, she is quite the pillar in most
films she appear in. Other actors will find big shoes to fill if they try to
play the archetypal docile housewife she has perfected. She is kind of like the
gentler equivalent of what Yeo Yann Yann would play. This year, it is
heartening to see Kelly step into more wayward roles as a scheming evil mother
who plotted the death of her daughter in Daisy and a mother desperate for
connection with her daughter who helps her cheat in the exams in Chasing Paper.
Someone hand Kelly an award please.
Still from Chasing Paper, featuring Kelly Lim
Death Note
Death has always had a
colourful face. Films about death have typically deal with the aftermath or
afterlife, with the aftermath most commonly manifested as family feuds over the
deceased’s estate. We have seen enough of the HDB funeral drama where siblings
argue over who took care of the deceased the most, against garishly-coloured paper
offerings as a backdrop. There were a few novel attempts at reinventing the
genre of death. Such is Life is a karmic tale about the trade of embalming the
deceased told with the zest and colour palette of a candy-hued telco
commercial. Think StarHub and some of their quirky ads. Have a Nice Death
envisions the job of a call operator for the newly-dead. He basically picks up
their calls and directs them to where they should go, wishing them ‘Have a Nice
Death’ before he hands up. Again, the tongue-in-cheek humour subverts the
notion of death, making this a rather enjoyable tease. Chopsticks, a rather
unassuming film (due to its simple set up, humble cast credentials and
no-frills cinematography), delights with an ingenious payoff at the end. It
tells a simple tale of how a granddad bonds with his grandson through lessons on
using chopsticks. This lesson proved priceless. Bobo Fishball take note: this
could be your next winning TVC idea.
The Snowpiercer Effect
Unsurprisingly, films
material about foreign workers featured in this competition and actually
outperformed the others. Bangla which won Best Film in the Media Student
category, is an unassuming film with an reaffirming note on humanity and
compassion, telling the story about a friendship between an injured Bangladeshi
worker and his temporary hawker stall employer who secretly hired him. Another
outstanding foreign worker film was Ave Maria in the Open category about the
Filipino flame of a domestic worker who came to Singapore to search for her
after she had become uncontactable. Unfortunately, the actors in this film did
not qualify for any acting awards because of their nationality. They would have swept the acting awards if they did.
Still from Bangla
The Rest
Still from Breakdown
Singaporeans are quite a
literal lot. Somehow, we tend to lack the innate ability to see poetry in
things. Our creativity comes more in the craft than in the idea. The following
films stood out from the clutter for their courage to bring to light new
material or bring to our consciousness new voices. Breakdown is refreshing in
how it finds boiling point drama in a mundane situation of carrying out patrol duties
and the characters are torn between their regimental identity and personal
identities. Acting 101 depicts a couple mending their broken relationship
though taking part in an acting class. Not award-winning material, but the
acting class illuminates their grievances in a whole new way. Scentiment deals
with memory and focuses on something film cannot capture- scent. A widow misses
her late husband and certain scents trigger off his imagined manifestations.
Clever twist at the end as well. Oh Meri Jaane Jaan is a short film you cannot
miss for its ambitious ‘appropriation’ has of Bollywood splendour. A lady who
complains about her neighbour watching his noisy Bollywood show finds herself,
well, transported into one, as one of the characters. The effect, though not
hilarious, is cute and no effort was spared on the glittery costumes or the
droves of backup dancers. The Parchment, which won Best Lighting, was a
film that rested on a very dark premise – child sacrifice. I applaud the
filmmakers for daring to go all the way with the gore and their sensitive hand
in directing this psycho-thriller. CASH was a delightful dark comedy about a
mutiny by a group of auntie cashiers at your neighbourhood supermarket against
their bosses. A seemingly difficult notion like that in docile Singapore, was
brought to life and colour under the skilful hands of director Tan Wei Ting who
won Best Director in the Open Category. A near-pitch-perfect film in which everything
fell right into place, chiefly from having a heaven-made quartet of aunties
fronting this drama.
Still from Oh Meri Jaane Jaan
Still from CASH
If there was one film
that reinvented the heartland motif, it was Better Together. No surprises if
you are guessing it sounds like a political campaign tagline. Seemingly-fashion
after an iconic feet-stomping young female politician in the 2011 elections,
Better Together tells the story of a young lady who needs to find the balance
between managing her family relationships and chasing her political ambitions.
Though, not brilliant cinema, it incites and provokes, especially with familiar
tokens of election fever like the orchid garland, the flags and the posters. I
thought it was rather endearing how her posters were DIY courtesy of her family’s
printing machines (they run a printing business), though it wasn’t clear
whether the ‘white party’ which she is part of is an incumbent or an opposition
party.
Still from Better Together
Watching 200 (close to)
films was indeed a mammoth task to finish but evidently, the breadth of genres
made it breezier. I was so glad there were no clones of dinner table family
drama, young men going through the military rites of passage ala Ah Boys To
Men, posey gangsters giving us lessons on brotherhood and most of all, our old
friend, nostalgia, for the sake of nostalgia. However, we are always going to
be fixated on something and indeed if these entries are anything to go by, I am
glad our conversations about local short films will move on to new turfs. To
end off my little spiel about the NYFA entries, this little film deserves a prize
for being the only film that all three pre-jury members re-watched together in
Nicholas Chee’s (director of NYFA) cosy office – The Dancer. Horror in the confines, chiefly the time constraint, of a short film seems not shiok at all. But try watching The Dancer alone in the office late at night and you will know what I mean.
Written by Jeremy Sing
Here is the list of winners:
Media Student Category
Best Film - Bangla
Best Direction - Alexis Terese for Joyride
Best Screenplay - Gabriel Isaac Goh for Breakdown
Best Camerawork - Buying Back Grace
Best Lighting - The Parchment
Best Colour Grading - Buying Back Grace
Best Editing - Bangla
Best Production Design - Buy Back Grace
Best Sound - Breakdown
Fujifilm Best Documentary - Living in Chains
Best Animated Film - Big Top Dreams
For the full list of winners, click here.
Written by Jeremy Sing
Lights were dimmed in The Flying Kicks Asia office for the repeat screening of The Dancer
Real scares from The Dancer stirring up real laughs
Lights on again!
(Pictured here are Director of NYFA, Nicholas Chee and Ying Tong from Flying Kicks Asia, apart from the 3 Pre-Jury, all in colour block tees)
***
Here is the list of winners:
Media Student Category
Best Film - Bangla
Best Direction - Alexis Terese for Joyride
Best Screenplay - Gabriel Isaac Goh for Breakdown
Best Camerawork - Buying Back Grace
Best Lighting - The Parchment
Best Colour Grading - Buying Back Grace
Best Editing - Bangla
Best Production Design - Buy Back Grace
Best Sound - Breakdown
Fujifilm Best Documentary - Living in Chains
Best Animated Film - Big Top Dreams
Open Youth Category
Best Film - Pencil
Best Direction - Tan Wei Ting for Cash
Best Screenplay - Pencil
Best Camerawork - Timecase
Best Editing - Sylvia
Best Production Design - 1% Chance of Sushine
Best Sound - CASH
Best Documentary - Displaced
Best Animated Film - What Has to Be
Best Actor - James Fong in Red Bean Soup
Best Actress - Cassandra Jean Spykerman in Hiding Birds
Best Overall School - Nanyang Technological School
For the full list of winners, click here.
Here are some snapshots from the Awards Ceremony last Saturday. Photos courtesy of Yin Teen
Jerrold Chong and team receiving the award for Best Animated Film in the Open Youth category
Presenters David Lee, Vice President of Singapore Film Society and Erwin Han, Co-Founder of Robot Playground Media
Sabrina Poon winning Best Editing for her film Sylvia
Everyone in the shot!