As in the past two years, Singapore’s 2007 output of over a dozen features is a promising sign for the country’s film future. The government, following its resolve to make the city-state “a 21st century communications and media hub” aimed it support at international co-productions such as Protégé (Moon To, Yee Tung Shing), The Home Song Stories (Tony Ayres), The Tattooist (Peter Burger). It also threw its weight behind the digital animation Legend of The Sea (Dong Hai Zhan, Benjamin Toh), an area the government is keen to develop. Other public incentives designed to attract foreign collaboration and investment have included subsidies to high-definition projects, interactive digital media and television co-productions. Established studios have been invited to set up local branches, as have well-known overseas universities. Thus, the LaSalle College of the Arts inaugurated its Puttnam School of Film in a new, striking building in 2006, offering a cross-disciplinary undergraduate film programme with plans to introduce postgraduate degrees in filmmaking and film studies in the near future. Another new school was the New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, which opened its Tisch Asia School of the Arts in 2007. Its Master of Fine Arts programme in film production is about to start in 2008. According to the authorities, the aim is to achieve a sustainable production of 10-15 movies annually within three to five years. Whether this goal will be achieved remains to be seen. But the fact that feature production is on the rise, and that the quality of filmmaking is also improving, is certainly a step in the right direction. The country’s censorship is slowly relaxing but films on political issues, especially those critical of the government, are still taboo. Martyn See’s 49-minute documentary, Zahari’s 17 Years (2006), was banned. It was about former opposition party leader, Said Zahari, who was detained without trial between 1963-79. See also focussed his attention on Singapore’s impoverished elderly in his excellent 18-minute documentary, Nation Builders (2007). This was about the neglect of those who had helped build the country, who are now left to scrape a living from underpaid jobs and by scavenging cardboard and tin cans. Thanks to the Internet and YouTube, these politically and socially critical films are available to a wider audience. Homosexuality in film is another area of concern for the authorities. The boldly experimental feature Solos, directed by Kan Lume and Loo Zihan, was cut by the censors. The move forced the film to be withdrawn from public screening at the 2007 Singapore International Film Festival as the SIFF has a policy not to screen censored films. But it was allowed to compete for the festival’s Silver Screen Awards. Rated R21, Solos explores the complex relationships and internal struggles of a gay teacher-student relationship. This is expressed entirely without dialogue through haunting visuals and music. In 2007, the well-respected SIFF celebrated its 20th anniversary. Recognised for its role in promoting Asian and South-East Asian cinema to the world, the festival is one of Singapore’s most important cultural events. Its contribution to the country’s film revival cannot be overestimated. But the SIFF’s severe under funding by the government has not only enabled younger, better subsidised festivals such as Pusan to push ahead, but is leaving its future in jeopardy. Thanks to growing awareness for the need to cultivate and promote homegrown film talent, the lack of exhibition space for Singapore’s independent filmmakers is gradually being addressed. Other than state institutions such as the National Museum Cinémathèque, commercial cinema operators are also promoting local film productions, especially Golden Village and Cathay, each of which has a dedicated cinema for non-mainstream screenings. There are also a number of private venues offering art house screening space, a recent addition being Sinema, which opened at the end of 2007 with the aim of showing exclusively Singapore-made movies. However, the paucity of audiences for indigenous production is still a problem. If mainstream Singapore productions find it hard to attract audiences at home, it is considerably worse for the independents, most of which are unlikely to ever see a profit at the local box-office. The first Singapore-made release of 2007 was One Last Dance by Brazilian-born Hong Kong director Max Makowski, a joint venture of Singapore’s Mediacorp Raintree Pictures, the Media Development Authority (MDA) and China-based Ming Productions. This style-over-substance action gangster drama set in Singapore and starring Hong Kong actor Francis Ng and Taiwanese Vivian Hsu, was actually completed in 2006 and released in several countries before reaching Singapore screens. Raintree continued its international co-production strategy by suspending its customary partnership with Jack Neo for the Chinese New Year in 2007. Instead, it teamed up with Hong Kong filmmaker Derek Yee to make the anti-drug thriller Protégé, starring Daniel Wu and Andy Lau. Protégé competed with Jack Neo’s Just Follow Law, as both movies were released on the same day in February. Neo’s S$1.3m comedy, lampooning office politics and red tape, starring popular television personalities Fann Wong and Gurmit Singh in cross-dressing roles. It was well received, taking in S$2.78m at the box office. Protégé did less well at home at S$1.7m, but its strong international appeal will no doubt mean lucrative returns for Raintree, who footed about 30 percent of the S$8m budget. Another investment of considerable expense (for a Singapore production) was the S$6m 3-D animated feature Legend of the Sea directed by Benjamin Toh. Aimed at the international market, this MDA-supported film based its story on a Chinese legend about the young son of the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea. Like its predecessor, however, Singapore’s first 3-D animated feature, Zodiac–The Race Begins..., Legend was a dismal flop critically and commercially at home. It was far below the expectations of audiences used to the narrative polish and production values of Dreamworks and Pixar. A more successful project, at least in artistic terms, was Raintree’s co-production Home Song Stories, the first joint venture between Singapore and Australia. It reaped substantial critical acclaim, including Best Direction and Best Screenplay from Australian Film Institute, Golden Horse Award for Best Screenplay, Best Feature at Hawaii IFF, Best Screenplay at Film Critics Circle of Australia Awards and about a dozen of other wins and nominations. The semi-autobiographical tale, written and directed by Tony Ayres, stars Joan Chen as a beautiful but erratic former cabaret singer from Shanghai living in Australia with her two children. Singapore’s Qi Yuwu plays her young illegal immigrant lover. Raintree also released another co-production later in the year, this time with New Zealand. Peter Burger’s The Tattooist is a horror movie about a tattoo artist who unwittingly unleashes an evil spirit. As the island’s only full-time film studio, most of Raintree’s international co-productions are commercial ventures that may be part and parcel of developing a nascent film industry, but have little to do with the country’s life and identity. This is left to small, independent productions such as Tan Pin Pin’s Invisible City (2007), a companion piece to her earlier Singapore GaGa (2005). The sixty-minute DV documentary is a journey of discovery into Singapore’s lost history, involving interviews with people such as an amateur filmmaker who had shot unique colour documentary footage in Singapore and Malaya about fifty years ago; a bedridden photographer whose photos recorded a landscape of the city’s now vanished colonial architecture; and a former Chinese school student activist who offers an unofficial viewpoint of the Chinese middle school riots of 1956. Invisible City was invited to the Forum sidebar at the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival. Another noteworthy effort was Wee Li Lin’s debut feature, Gone Shopping, a small gem of a movie that plays on the fact that Singapore considers itself a shopping paradise and that a major pastime of many of the city’s inhabitants is shopping. In fact, the film is supported by the Singapore Tourism Board. Ironically, the film unveils the emptiness of its characters who pass their time in the city’s shopping centres. Told in three interweaving tales the characters include a rich but lonely housewife, a young Tamil girl abandoned in a 24-hour mall, and a bored young man who falls for a “cosplay” (costume play)-obsessed girl. Also a feature debut, Truth Be Told by Teo Eng Tiong, is set in a run-down public housing estate. As with a number of independent films, this mystery drama examines the darker aspects of life hidden beneath Singapore’s polished veneer, in particular, pointing to the plight of the elderly poor. The movie won Best Original Film at the Asian Film Festival in Rome in October 2007. The most popular Singapore-made production of 2007, however, was a musical, something that has not been attempted since Glen Goei’s Forever Fever (aka That’s the Way I Like It) in 1998. A departure from his usual art house fare, 881 takes its inspiration from the loud, kitschy, glitzy world of the getai (literally song stage), a form of song and dance entertainment that takes place during the Chinese Seventh Lunar Month – the Month of the Hungry Ghosts. The story centres on how two young women rise to getai stardom, calling themselves the Papaya Sisters (in Mandarin, “papaya” sounds like 881) and their tooth-and-nail struggle with unscrupulous competitors. The story is seen through the eyes of a deaf-mute played by Qi Yuwu, who also played in Home Song Stories, to whom director Tan lends his voice as narrator. 881 dazzles the audience with campy displays of song, dance and lavish costumes while abandoning itself to tearful melodrama, undermining the film’s artistic value but pushing up ticket sales. Made for about S$1m, the feature made it to the Top Ten of 2007 by taking in S$3.5 m – one of a handful of Singapore films to cross the S$3m mark. Works like 881 and Invisible City are examples of the growing interest among Singapore’s filmmakers in exploring the past, and preserving disappearing traditions.
Yvonne Ng Uhde and Jan Uhde