As in past years, the road to building a credible film industry
in Singapore continues to be a slow and an uphill climb.
The city-state’s feature production output in 2003 could be
counted on the fingers of one hand - four features plus
one Hong Kong production, the latter co-financed by
Singapore’s Raintree Pictures (established in 1998), the
filmmaking subsidiary of state-owned broadcaster
MediaCorp.
Raintree’s main production in 2003 was Jack Neo’s
Homerun, a US $900,000 remake of Iranian Majid Majidi’s
Children of Heaven (1997). The film was released on 37
screens, the widest opening ever for a local feature.
Coming from the filmmaker and star of the phenomenally
successful I Not Stupid (2002), the publicity and anticipation
generated was unsurprising. In fact, Homerun became
the top-grossing Chinese title of the year, taking in US$1.4
million and securing a place on Singapore’s Top Ten boxoffice
chart.
Despite its popular appeal, the film did less well with the
critics. Set in 1965 (the year Singapore was expelled from
Malaysia and became an independent Republic), Homerun
transposes Majidi’s story to an undeveloped young
Singapore where much of its population was poor and settled
largely in kampongs (villages). As in the Iranian film,
the story focusses on a pair of siblings from a penniless
family who are forced to share shoes when the boy Ah Kun
(Shawn Lee) accidentally loses his younger sister’s school
shoe. Neo introduces a subplot showing the rivalry
between Ah Kun and his friends and another group of boys
that invokes the Singapore-Malaysia political disputes of
more recent times. This rather clumsy satire, though lost
on the uninitiated, has the unfortunate effect of looking like
political propaganda; as a result, the film was banned in
Malaysia.
Considering its production values, Homerun is one of the
country’s best so far. However, for a movie modelled on a
neo-realist subject, the scenes of rustic charm, shot in
Malaysia, would be more convincing if the streets and the
houses were not quite so gleaming and devoid of litter, or
the faces and clothing of the characters so evidently fresh
and well-scrubbed. Equally artificial is the perfectly spoken
Mandarin at a time when the use of dialects would have
been the norm. The omnipresent sentimental score merely
adds to the sense of contrivance and the heavy-handed
moralising effectively removes Neo’s film from the touching
and honest simplicity of the Iranian original. Homerun’s
saving grace lies in the engaging performance of the children,
particularly that of Megan Zheng who plays Ah Kun’s
sister, Seow Fang. The 10-year-old won the Best New
Performer award at Taiwan’s 2003 Golden Horse Film
Festival.
Turn Left Turn Right (Xiang zuo zuo, xiang you zou, 2003),
Raintree’s coproduction with Hong Kong’s Milkyway Image
and Warner Bros. Pictures, is a romantic drama based on
Taiwanese author Jimmy Liao’s illustrated story of the
same name. It was directed by Hong Kong’s Johnnie To and
Wai Ka-fai. The US$3 million feature received a number of
festival nominations and went on to win Golden Horse
Award for Best Original Film Song. The film’s success was
naturally a triumph for Raintree. Joint ventures such as this
and Infernal Affairs II (Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, 2003)
enhance Singapore’s profile as a film-producing country,
helping those involved gain experience and exposure and
hopefully financial profit but otherwise, they have little to do
with Singapore.
More “homegrown” is the English-language road actioncomedy
City Sharks (2003) by TV sitcom writer and firsttime
film director Esan Sivalingam. Produced for US
$380,000 by Nexus Net, Hoods Inc and the Singapore Film
Commission, the feature is about a young man and his two
pals (played by Singaporeans Nicolas Lee, Sheikh Haikel
and Malaysian actor Hans Isaac) who try to help the financially
strapped orphanage where they grew up from having
to close down. They hatch a plot to raise cash by collecting
debts owed to a dead loan shark, embarking on a madcap
chase across Malaysia and back. Despite its flaws,
especially in over-stretching the farcical component and
overacting, the comedy has enough plot twists and turns to
be entertaining, helped by fine photography and editing, a
pulsating score and decent performances by the clowning
trio. The script, also by the director, won the 2002 Los
Angeles Screen Arts Foundation Prize for Screenwriting.
2003 also saw the first “community film” jointly produced
by the Network for Community Action for the Rehabilitation
of Ex-offenders (comprising several governmental agen-cies), the National Council Against Drug Abuse and local
company Gateway Entertainment at a cost of US$150,000.
Twilight Kitchen (Gerald Lee, 2003) was made to help
counter prejudices in employing former offenders1. It is
thankfully less didactic than might have been expected,
being essentially a social drama about the lack of humanism
in a self-regarding, materialistic society. The film stars
Zhang Wenxiang as an ex-prisoner struggling to gain
acceptance at the restaurant where he works and veteran
TV comedian Moses Lim in a challenging role as the former
Master Chef, now a stroke victim neglected by his children.
It premiered at the Singapore Botanic Gardens with about
2000 ex-convicts in attendance.
The most talked about feature of 2003 was Royston Tan’s
15. It is based on Tan’s 2002 prize-winning short of the
same title portraying the lives of three actual fifteen-yearold
delinquents who play themselves. Shot in a semi-documentary
style with an eye for evocative and lyrical imagery,
the 90-minute movie is a bold and honest exploration of
the boys’ painful physical and emotional reality. The film
was produced by Eric Khoo for under US$117,000 with a
US$30,000 grant from the Singapore Film Commission2.
Tan’s feature version included much of the original short,
two new characters and several explicit scenes such as a
close-up of an erect penis, drug-taking, self-mutilation and
the suicide of young people. It premiered at the Singapore
International Film Festival in April 2003 where all 1,200
seats for its single screening were snapped up in four
days3. It was passed without cuts and given an R(A) rating4
for the festival screening only, while its theatrical release
was rated “R(A) with cuts” of under 5 minutes because of
a perceived threat to law and order. Tan’s feature won the
NETPAC/ FIPRESCI Award5 at the Singapore International
Film Festival (SIFF) in 2003. It competed at the Venice Film
Festival in the same year and was shown at a number of
international festivals including the First Paris Asian Film
Festival in 2004.
The advantage of the feature-length 15 was that it
reached a much wider audience but the compact short
remains the more powerful film artistically. On the whole,
however, both versions of 15 are important for their honest
and revealing social commentary and confirm Royston
Tan as a distinctive new voice in Singapore cinema.
Censorship was a hot issue for much of 2003 as the generally
conservative population and the more liberal arts
community waited to see how far the authorities would go
in accepting the recommendations made by the Censorship
Review Committee (CRC). In the end, based on an AC
Nielsen survey that found the majority of Singaporeans
happy with the existing regulations, the CRC’s proposals
were less groundbreaking than anticipated and even then
not all its suggestions were accepted by the authorities. In
the area of film classification, for example, the proposal to
lower the NC16 (No Children Under 16) to NC15 was
rejected. The government agreed to the introduction of an
M18 (Mature 18) category and to adjust the R(A) -
Restricted Artistic - to simply R21. However, the new ratings
do not mean that films will no longer be subject to
cuts.
More positive is that theatrical movies can now be released
under two ratings (but not at the same time), improving the
chances that more films will be shown in their entirety. In its
bid to become an international arts centre and a “Global
Media City”, the government is injecting significant funds
into developing the film and media industries but it will be
interesting to see how far this goal can be achieved in the
face of the country’s general conservatism.
More than its feature production, it is the short film that is
gaining Singapore international recognition. Being less
subject to censorship control, the short format allows for
greater artistic freedom and experimentation and is an
indispensable training ground for future feature filmmakers.
These young short filmmakers are bringing home
international awards literally by the dozen.
Some of the recent successes include Radio Station Forgot
to Play My Favourite Song (2003) by Gavin Chelvan, Siau
Che Sheng and Billy Tan, an engaging documentary on the
vibrant rock production in Singapore lambasting its neglect
by the local radio stations. The short was awarded
Singapore’s Media Development Authority Book Prize for
Best Documentary. Jason Lai made the delightfully quirky
animated 3 Feet Apart (2003, 6 min) about the impact of
technology on human life. It won the Best Animation prize
in the Asian Short Film category at the Bangkok
International Film Festival, 2004. The reflective The Ground
I Stand (Di Mana Bumi Dipijak, 2002) is a captivating documentary
by Malaysian-born Sherman Ong, entirely composed
of the personal recollections of a simple septuagenarian
Singaporean Malay (Muslim) woman. The film
received the Gold Award for Best Documentary at the 7th
Malaysian Video Awards in 2002. Yong Mun Chee’s 9:30,
about a man trying to forget the girl he loves, won Best
Film in the experimental category at the 1st US-ASEAN
Film, Video and Photography Festival 2003 in Washington,
DC.
Singapore shorts have made significant strides over the
past few years. This relatively open, economical and flexible
medium has become a closely watched springboard for
the country’s aspiring filmmakers who are quietly but
steadily casting new light on the city-state’s reality to audiences
at home and abroad.
1 According to an official report last year, 11,000 offenders are
released from prison and drug rehabilitation centres each year
and more than 900 of them seek governmental help to secure
employment.
2 The year before, according to Tan, the SFC had refused to fund
the 15 short because they “could not understand the script”.
3 Actually, the tickets’ release was delayed by a week as the print
was held up by the censors while deliberating the film’s rating.
4 R(A) or “Restricted-Artistic” restricted admission to those 21
years and above. The R(A) rating required the film to show
artistic merit. In 2004, this ambiguous requirement was
dropped and the rating changed to “R21”.
5 Since 1997 at the SIFF, the jury of the Network for the
Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC) has worked together with
the jury of the International Federation of Film Critics
(FIPRESCI).
Jan Uhde & Yvonne Ng Uhde