Singapore’s 2006 annual output of about a dozen features was the highest since the beginning of the revival period in 1991, averaging six to eight movies per year. The rise in film production was no doubt helped by the government’s resolve to make the country “a 21st century communications and media hub”. This has taken the form of incentives to local filmmakers, international co-productions, subsidies to digital high-definition productions, and wooing established studios to set up divisions and prestigious universities to open campuses in Singapore. In February 2006, for example, the British film producer David Puttnam visited LaSalle-SIA College of the Arts Media Arts to officially launch the Puttnam School of Film which will be offering Singapore’s first and only degree in film production. Postgraduate degrees in filmmaking and film studies are planned as well.
Furthermore, the New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts will begin its Graduate Film Production programme in Singapore in September 2007. Man Shu Sum, the new director of Media Development Authority’s (MDA) broadcast and film development, says that the Singapore film industry is in the early stages of growth, stressing the country’s aim to achieve a sustainable production of 10-15 movies annually within three to five years.
Still, despite the rising production standards of locally made features, there was little improvement in the artistic quality department. The shortage of good scripts and acting remain the Achilles’ heel of Singapore cinema. Moreover, only about half the movies completed in 2006 have been given a local theatrical release.
The most profitable feature of the year was, not surprisingly, Jack Neo’s satirical comedy I Not Stupid Too (Xiaohai Bu Ben 2), a sequel to the popular and critically successful I Not Stupid (2002), produced by MediaCorp Raintree Pictures and local video entertainment distributor Scorpio East Pictures for S$1.5m with support from the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports. Neo’s J Team Productions handled the production under the supervision of Raintree.
In this film, Neo aims his criticism at Singaporean parents’ interpretation of child care in wholly materialistic terms without really trying to understand their children. He also satirizes some of the notorious deficiencies of Singapore’s education system - its rigidity and difficulty in accommodating young people’s individuality and creativity. Thematically, Neo again touched the nerve of the average Singaporean who rewarded him with a comfortable third place at the 2006 box office top-ten chart (S$4.18m), beating even Hollywood blockbusters such as Mission: Impossible III. Despite being panned by local critics, it landed as the second top-grossing Singapore-made feature. Beyond its desirable and useful social function however, the comedy, with its explicit screen didacticism and schmaltzy ending, appears to be another one of the director’s familiar TV-derived routine, both in subject, plot and style.
Continuing his successful marketing strategy, Neo released his most recent feature in the lucrative period of the Chinese New year celebrations (mid-February in 2007). Starring Gurmit Singh and Fann Wong, the new satirical comedy Just Follow Law (Wo Zai Zheng Fu Bu Men De Ri Zi) is set in a government office environment with the barbs this time aimed at bureaucratic red tape.
Like I Not Stupid Too, the feature Singapore Dreaming (Mei Man Ren Sheng, 2006), co-directed by the husband-and-wife team Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen and produced by Singapore’s notable plastic surgeon Woffles Wu, reflects on the country’s family and social problems by focusing on personal relationships. The low-budget (S$800,000) independent production centers on the hopes and aspirations of a working class family. Like most Singaporeans, the characters measure happiness mainly through the material yardstick. When Pa, the family head, wins a big lottery prize, everybody expects that their problems will be quickly solved - but the opposite happens. Singapore Dreaming explores the materialistic obsessions of Singaporeans with much more subtlety than most of its predecessors that have dwelled on the topic including Jack Neo’s Money No Enough and The Best Bet. However, looking at its box-office of S$453,000 after a theatrical run of three and a half weeks, it may be that subtlety is not what the average Singaporean viewer is comfortable with.
Following the Singapore government’s commitment to international co-productions, Mediacorp Raintree Pictures and the Media Development Authority (MDA), together with China-based Ming Productions, jointly produced One Last Dance, an action gangster drama by the Brazilian-born Hong Kong director Max Makowski. Starring Hong Kong actor Francis Ng (Infernal Affairs II), Vivian Hsu from Taiwan and Harvey Keitel in a cameo role, this Singapore-set film noir draws inspiration from Hong Kong gangster movies and Park Chan-wook’s “vengeance trilogy.” As observed by many a viewer, Francis Ng as T, a hit-man employed by a mafia boss searching for the kidnappers of his son, is the main reason to watch the film. The movie premiered in January 2006 at the Sundance Film Festival where it participated in competition. At the Newport Beach Film Festival in California, it secured for its Hong Kong cameraman Charlie Lam a Jury award for Best Cinematography Feature. One Last Dance was released in several countries in 2006 before it had its Singapore theatrical premiere in January 2007.
Director-producer Eric Khoo embodies what could be called the artistic quarter of Singapore cinema. In July 2006, his independent company Zhao Wei Films released Royston Tan’s eagerly anticipated feature 4:30. The film is an ambitious minimalist portrait of urban alienation presented through the wordless relationship between Zhang Xiao Wu (Xiao Li Yuan), a young boy left alone in his flat with Jung (Kim Young Jun),a depressed and suicidal Korean tenant. Very little is said between the two, yet the boy seems to be strangely obsessed with the man, sneaking into the latter’s room in the middle of the night (hence the film’s title) to rummage through his possessions. The sadness of abandonment, the inability to communicate, the depressing anonymity of living in a large city, the restricted dialogue, sparse gesture and languid pace reveal Tan’s fascination with Tsai Ming-liang’s territory. Unfortunately, the plot and characterisation are so thinly written that the film seems far too long for its ninety-minute screening time.
Eric Khoo himself completed No Day Off (2006) commissioned by the Digital Short Films by Three Filmmakers section of the Jeonju International Film Festival (Korea). His film, along with shorts by the noted Kazakh filmmaker Darezhan Omirbayev and Pen-ek Ratanaruang from Thailand, is distributed as Talk to Her: Digital Shorts By Three Filmmakers (Digital Sam In Sam Saek 2006: Talk To Her). Khoo’s 39-minute semi-documentary - one of his finest achievements, focuses on the largely ignored problem of the exploitation and abuse of Singapore’s foreign domestic maids. The film’s title reflects the fact that until recently, maids working in Singapore had no legal right to rest days written into their contracts (a legislation change requiring one day off per month for domestic workers was introduced in early 2006). Khoo offers a detached, almost clinically precise chronicle of (the fictional) Siti’s Singapore sojourn of over 1,500 days starting in her home village in Sulawesi (Indonesia), through her training on the island of Batam off Singapore followed by service in three socially stratified Singapore households - without a single day off. Khoo’s camera focuses exclusively on the maid: her employers are strictly off-screen, present only through their voices - mostly orders, reproaches and verbal abuse. No Day Off confirms the observation that many of the best achievements of Singapore cinema are shorts.
Kelvin Tong was one of six directors involved in the Asian film project Focus: First Cuts, launched by Hong Kong star Andy Lau to support young Asian talent. Together with filmmakers from Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China and Malaysia, he was invited to make a Chinese-language feature-length film in high definition, set in his home city. Tong chose to make Love Story, an ostentatious and stylish “art movie.” Though shot in Singapore, Tong wanted to have an unspecific Asian rather than a Singaporean look. The strong point of this feature are excellent production values as well as the remarkably subtle acting of the main character, a pulp-romance writer played by Chinese actor Allen Lin. The film’s post-postmodernist multi-layered stories à la Godard, however, are a semi-penetrable blend of time and space, reality and fantasy, lyricism and graphic violence, poetry and eroticism.
A deluge of visual and literary references to filmmakers such as Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange), Kieslowski (The Double Life Of Veronique), Cocteau-distilled Greek mythology (Orphée) and to film noir, exude unrestrained pretense. Eating Air, the director’s feature debut, still remains his benchmark. Love Story, made for US$500,000 and shot in two weeks, premiered at the Singapore International Film Festival in 2006, where it won the prize for Best Director.
The promising growth of computer animation world-wide has fuelled the Singapore government’s ambition to develop its own production. The first fruit of this effort is the country’s first 3-D animated feature Zodiac: The Race Begins... (2006), produced by homegrown Cubix International and directed by Edward Foo (aka Fu). The movie, like I Not Stupid Too, was released in January, just before the Chinese New year celebrations, and tells of how the twelve animals came to be the symbols of the ancient Chinese zodiac. To lend the movie a familiar touch, the voice-dubbing included popular stars Fann Wong and Dennis Chew. Zodiac’s reception was less than auspicious, with critics bristling over the movie’s poor plot, uneven pacing and awkward animation.
Singapore’s Grace Phan, former television journalist (CNBC and ABC Asia-Pacific) completed her directorial debut A Hero’s Journey (2006), an 81-minute documentary on East Timor (Timor-Leste). The film is narrated by and focussed on the new country’s charismatic president José Alexandre (“Xanana”) Gusmão, as he guides the viewer through how Timor-Leste gained its independence from Indonesia. At a deeper level, it portrays the spiritual journey of a remarkable man and the power of forgiveness. Curiously, while three other films on East Timor have been banned by the Indonesian authorities, including another Singapore-made documentary Passabe (Lynn Lee and James Leong, 2005), A Hero’s Journey won the Amnesty International’s “Movies that Matter Award” in December 2006 at the Jakarta International Film Festival’s Human Rights film competition. It received the Top 3 Documentaries, Audience Award at its world premiere at the Sydney Film Festival and the Gold Award by the Australian Cinematographers Society. The film’s title has now been changed to Where the Sun Rises.
At the end of the year, enfant terrible director Martyn See (Singapore Rebel) completed Zahari’s 17 Years (2006), a 49-minute documentary on Singapore’s famous political detainee Said Zahari, a former newspaper editor arrested in 1963 just hours after becoming an opposition party leader. He was kept in detention without trial for seventeen years on the basis of Singapore’s Internal Security Act (still in effect). After his release, Mr. Zahari moved to Malaysia where he has lived a private life. See’s film, most of which is in interview form, was expected to be screened at the Singapore International Film Festival in April 2006 but had to be removed from the programme. At the time of writing, the public screening of the documentary in Singapore appears to be in limbo. It did however make its North American premiere in Toronto in March 2007, together with See’s most recent documentary Speakers Cornered, about the foiled attempts of activists to stage a peaceful protest at the location officially designated for Singapore citizens to air their opinions. Fortunately, there is always the internet, where banned films such as See’s Singapore Rebel may be downloaded in full.
Yvonne Ng Uhde e Jan Uhde