k'NA ThE DrEAmWEAvEr - Singapore Art Museum

10 April – 3 May Moving Image Gallery, SAM at 8Q

CONTENTS

The Southeast Asian Film Festival celebrates its fifth year with an exciting presentation of the newest and most compelling cinematic work emerging from the region. A line-up of films and post-screening discussions from emerging and veteran directors will provide a diverse, engaging view into essential aspects of contemporary Southeast Asia. A celebration of independent filmmaking, the Festival provides a space for intercultural and philosophical sharing, and for art and film friendships to form.

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Festival Screening Schedule

44

SNAKESKIN

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Love, Devotion and (no) Surrender... By Philip Cheah

46

2030

48

Riddles of My Homecoming

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The Great Wheel of Time By Sam I-shan

50

Wukan: The Flame of Democracy

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The Last Executioner

52

NOVA

16

The Search for Weng Weng

54

About the Curators

18

Fluid Boundaries

55

About the Organiser

20

The Look of Silence

56

General Information

22

Sparks

24

Vanishing Point

26

Chasing Waves

28

Garuda Power: The Spirit Within

30

Aimless

32

K’na the Dreamweaver

34

Fundamentally Happy

36

JALANAN

38

Jade Miners

40

Justice

42

So Be It



FILM

DIRECTOR

YEAR

COUNTRY

RUNTIME

RATING

POST-SCREENING DISCUSSION

Fri, 10 Apr The Last Executioner Tom Waller 2014 Thailand 95 min M18 Tom Waller (Director) 7:30pm

10 April – 3 May Moving Image Gallery, Level 2, SAM at 8Q

$10* for each film screening.

25% off with purchase of 5 or more SEAFF 2015 tickets ($7.50* per screening) *Excludes SISTIC fee.

Concessions available. Tickets are available from SISTIC.

Sat, 11 Apr Australia The Search for Weng Weng Andrew Leavold 2013 96 min PG13 5:00pm /Philippines

Andrew Leavold (Director) Daniel Palisa (Producer)

Sat, 11 Apr Fluid Boundaries 7:30pm

Vladimir Todorovic (Director) Daniel Rudi Haryanto (Director)

Mun Jeonghyun, Vladimir Todorovic and 2014 Daniel Rudi Haryanto

Indonesia /Serbia/Singapore 87 min PG13 /South Korea

Denmark Sun, 12 Apr The Look of Silence Joshua Oppenheimer 2014 /Finland/Indonesia 99 min 3:00pm /Norway/UK

NC16

Sun, 12 Apr 5:30pm

M18

Sparks

Giancarlo Abrahan

2014

Philippines

120 min

Giancarlo Abrahan (Director)

Fri, 17 Apr Netherlands Jakrawal Nilthamrong Vanishing Point Jakrawal Nilthamrong 2015 100 min M18 7:30pm /Thailand (Director) Sat, 18 Apr Charliebebs Gohetia Chasing Waves Charliebebs Gohetia 2015 Philippines 92 min PG 5:00pm (Director) Sat, 18 Apr 7:30pm

Garuda Power: The Spirit Within

Bastian Meiresonne

2014

France/Indonesia 77 min

NC16

Sun, 19 Apr 3:00pm

Aimless

Pham Nhue Giang

2013

Vietnam

M18

87 min

Sun, 19 Apr K’na the Dreamweaver Ida Anita del Mundo 2014 Philippines 85 min PG 5:30pm

Ida Anita del Mundo (Director)

Fri, 24 Apr Fundamentally Happy 7:30pm

Tan Bee Thiam 2015 Singapore 60 min NC16 and Lei Yuan Bin

Tan Bee Thiam (Director) Lei Yuan Bin (Director)

Sat, 25 Apr 5:00pm

JALANAN

Daniel Ziv

2013

Indonesia

107 min

NC16

Sat, 25 Apr 7:30pm

Jade Miners

Midi Z

2015

Myanmar/Taiwan 104 min

PG13

www.singaporeartmuseum.sg/SEAFF

Sun, 26 Apr 3:00pm

Justice

Joel Lamangan

2014

Philippines

120 min

R21

#SEAFF2015

Sun, 26 Apr Kongdej So Be It 2014 Thailand 5:30pm Jaturanrasmee

85 min

PG

Fri, 1 May Portugal SNAKESKIN Daniel Hui 2014 7:30pm /Singapore

105 min

Limited seating. For ticket availability at the door, please call SISTIC at 6348 5555.

Daniel Hui (Director)

Sat, 2 May Nghiem-Minh 2030 2014 Vietnam 98 min M18 5:00pm Nguyen-Vo Sat, 2 May Riddles of My Homecoming Arnel Mardoquio 2013 Philippines 82 min R21 7:30pm



World Premiere



International Premiere

Yam Palma (Assistant Director)

Sun, 3 May 3:00pm

Wukan: The Flame of Democracy

Lynn Lee 2013 Singapore 90 min NC16 and James Leong

Sun, 3 May 5:30pm

NOVA

Nik Amir Mustapha

2014

Malaysia

106 min

NC16

Love, Devotion and (no) Surrender...

by Philip Cheah

Submitting to the Lord used to be all the rage. Sadly, it seems to me…it still is. In the no-holds-barred spirit of the 60s, everything had to be experimented with, every experience tested, even the experience of spirituality. “That was an important time in the ‘60s,” said jazz guitarist John McLaughlin, leader of the Mahavishnu Orchestra. “We were all trying to answer big questions: Who are we? What is real? What is the meaning of life? The Beatles, The Beach Boys – people were looking East for inspiration.” Hence Love, Devotion and Surrender, the album that McLaughlin recorded with guitar legend Carlos Santana, echoing the teachings of their guru, Sri Chinmoy.

Film still from The Last Executioner

Chinmoy advocated divine love, divine devotion, and divine surrender. He defined divine love as self-offering and self-expansion. He promoted a middle path where the seeker has the chance to renounce, or transform, the negative elements that obstruct a union with the Divine. Chinmoy said: “We are all seekers, and our goal is the same: to achieve inner peace, light and joy, to become inseparably one with our Source, and to lead lives full of true satisfaction.”

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Even then as today, that struggle between surrender and self-determination persists, just as the struggle between independence and co-option desperately rages. Each side posits its rationale. Chinmoy argues that surrender is NOT surrender. Surrender, in the spiritual sense is transformative – “when a tiny drop enters into the ocean, we cannot trace the drop,” he says, “It becomes the mighty ocean.” Today, that has become the attraction of the monolithic whole, to be part of the all-encompassing. Every little drop is better off not being a drop but a potential ocean. In short, surrender if you must, if you will, but just surrender. It’s your best choice.

Besides, the choices of not surrendering are just too painful. In Joel Lamangan’s Justice, superstar Nora Aunor practically inhabits the film by her masterful rendition of a slowly, corrupting soul. Her surrender to power and wealth reflects a soul that was numb a long time ago. In a revealing scene, Aunor witnesses a brutal fight while having lunch. She glances over casually then turns back to concentrate on her meal.

pick up a gun to support the livelihood of his family. But the periodic violence becomes a nightmare that requires Buddhist intercession.

Surrender to the brutality of making a living leads to another brutality, that of being Thailand’s last gun-toting executioner. From being a rock’n’roll musician, Chavoret Jaruboon (in Tom Waller’s The Last Executioner) had to

Surrender to family and tradition haunts K’na, a T’boli princess in Southern Philippines, who submits to a pre-arranged marriage to end a century-old clan war. Even so, in Ida Anita del Mundo’s K’na the Dreamweaver, violence still erupts.

Film still from K’na the Dreamweaver

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Daniel Rudi Haryanto, Vladimir Todorovic and Mun Jeonghyun’s Fluid Boundaries attest to the compromises that a multitude of people had to endure to find shelter – from the Vietnamese boat people of the 1970s who landed in Indonesia to the beleaguered Joseon people, residing in Japan, who had to choose between North and South Korea. In Tan Bee Thiam and Lei Yuan Bin’s Fundamentally Happy, paedophilia is not such sweet surrender. Or is it? What happens when memory plays tricks on you? What is it that you remember is real and what is it that is not? Taken on a larger scale, Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence looks at a whole country’s national amnesia. Like the adult paedophilia victim in Fundamentally Happy, the few surviving victims and the masses of victims’ families live with suppressed memories, especially when the killers are walking around, and when large numbers of them remain in power. How do you then not surrender to the bad memory? With a look of silence? That’s what one victim’s family attempts to do. But even when they confront the late killer’s family with an autobiographical book detailing his killing spree, his children and wife deny the fact.

In a more extreme fashion, Alfad, an overseas worker returns to Mindanao as a ghost in Arnel Mardoquio’s Riddles of My Homecoming. He visits his homeland teetering on the brink between dream and despair. His spirit awakens his people to rise up. That similar emotion is captured in Daniel Hui’s SNAKESKIN, where suppressed memories feed a dead cult leader’s mass power, and only the ghost of truth stands as light to the darkness. What happens when a professor falls in love with his ghostly muse? In Giancarlo Abrahan’s Sparks, truth will keep haunting you till it becomes flesh. Similarly in Jakrawal Nilthamrong’s Vanishing Point, the karmic wheel keeps on turning till you see it for what it is. For the village folk in Lynn Lee and James Leong’s Wukan: The Flame of Democracy, there is no more surrender. After losing everything to a corrupt system that made land grabs a pastime, they won the right for local elections. But after the dream, come the morning and then the nightmare. For the two kids in Charliebebs Gohetia’s Chasing Waves, getting forced off their land and relocated to the seaside is the dream come true. But not for the adults around them. For them, the nightmare has just begun.

Film still from Fundamentally Happy

And what if you had to chase your shooting star? For Berg in Nik Amir Mustapha’s NOVA, it’s the last chance to see and film the UFO that he saw during his school days. But it’s also his last chance to feel the love that he felt for his friends and his devotion to being a serious filmmaker. While they all tell him to surrender to reality, he knows in his heart that this is not the time to…

In Midi Z’s Jade Miners, poor Burmese men are forced to take up illegal mining in the rebel Kachin state where sporadic fighting still occurs. Between dodging the military and the prospect of roof cave-ins, they surrender to the interminable drudgery of their existence.

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Film still from Riddles of My Homecoming

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The Great Wheel of Time

Film still from Fluid Boundaries

By Sam I-shan

of filmic time and space, they explore the relationships between lived realities and established truths, as well as cause and effect, and interrogate how legitimacy is constructed and authority validated.

The medium of film allows for the telling of expansive epics and small stories alike, and over the years, the Southeast Asian Film Festival has played host to many independent directors and film narratives that highlight the alternative, minor or marginal. While it is conventional wisdom that history is authored by the victors because they are the ones who determine the framework from which stories spring and knowledge is categorised, it should be remembered that anything that now seems self-evident was in a former time unknown. All stories called historical truths were once new, and originated from particular times and places. Their present positions are secured because the justifications for their practice were likely built into the very process of their codification. This suggests that rather than thinking about the past, present and future in terms of dominance and marginality, it might be more productive to think of all realities as sharing similar narrative traditions. Before something ‘real’ exists as narrative, it must be inspired, invented and ordered.

Co-directed by Mun Jeonghyun, Vladimir Todorovic and Daniel Rudi Haryanto, the film Fluid Boundaries (2014) shows how the circumstances of history change the way that an individual locates him or herself as a subject in space. Indeed, it was the fate of circumstance (with the help of film festival circuits) that led these three directors to meet and share video letters that eventually became this film, which present a range of individuals whose common characteristics seem to be their displacement onto or across border territories. As we follow their stories, we start to wonder whether perhaps this is, in fact, the more usual way of being. Mun’s uncle, an older naturalised Korean-Japanese man, retains his ‘second-class’ legal status as a Joseon in Japan so as to keep his ties with North Korea, where some immediate family members still reside. When his sister there passes away, he changes his citizenship to South Korean so that he can visit a country that had not even been established at the time of his birth. In this case, the principles

Three experimental films in this year’s festival investigate these fundamental premises in strange and compelling ways. Using the aesthetic lexicon of cinema and the logic 8

of universality and equality that underpin the ideals of citizenship come head to head with the geopolitically-created issue of identity and the equally powerful pull of identification via blood ties. These seemingly abstract principles find concrete articulation in the way his uncle’s accent, vocabulary and gestures palpably but almost unconsciously change as he moves from place to place, assuming different linguistic inflections and constituents, and even altering the way that he bows. In another story, we meet a lonely last witness to an almost-forgotten piece of Indonesian history: a resident of one of the Riau Islands once occupied by hundreds of thousands of Indochinese refugees between 1979 and 1996, who were passing through either to be repatriated, or sent on to countries such as the United States or Australia. A wiry Indonesian

man, our guide to this ghost town, walks through the landscape pointing at various areas once occupied by people and buildings, but now overtaken by scrub and grassland. The land may be missing the vestiges of habitation, but the experience of those years has clearly made its mark, which we observe when he speaks for some time in Vietnamese at the end of his account. Slightly self-conscious at the start, the unfamiliar-sounding syllables soon roll off his tongue with native ease, and he becomes for a moment, possessed by other pasts and selves. What these stories point to is that the effects and circumstances of history linger most on the body, and affect one’s identity in a way that is both locational and locutional. Their utterances are moments that reveal the trace of history but also reveal the points at which history itself can be marked: in the telling of it. 9

Film stills from Vanishing Point

it simultaneously permits for great dynamism as individuals have a million and one possibilities to make decisions and perform acts that could change all that is to come.

Like the other Thai films in the line-up this year, Jakrawal Nilthamrong’s Vanishing Point (2015) deals with Buddhist concepts such as karma and the liberation of self. Karma’s temporal frame of reference is both cyclical and causal, as it proposes that the kind of life a person currently has is an accumulative effect of their past actions, and that their future lives will likewise be a result of what their deeds are in the present moment. This teleological notion of time and fixed framework of cause and consequence appears deeply fatalistic; however 10

Two main characters can initially be discerned from the film’s elliptical structure: a journalist and a factory owner. The journalist, a lonely figure whose casual companion is an older sex worker, follows the police as they investigate and reconstruct crime scenes. Meanwhile the factory owner, isolated from his wife and young daughter, has an affair with one of his employees. Revealed to be parallel figures, these two protagonists are depicted in a series of encounters with the other characters in the film, which in addition to those already mentioned, include a monk, a manservant and a mysterious old woman. The connections between them are circumstantial and almost diffident, based as much on silence, expression and gestures as they are on encounters and engagement.

Vanishing Point may be premised on karmic time, which is teleological, but in the film, time is out of joint in many ways. Only upon piecing the various narratives together do we realise that what appears at the beginning of the film is what devastatingly takes place at a later time, and sequences in which dreams are recounted and visions seen, together with a strange postlude, may exist at odds with the time of the film’s universe. The monk’s vision, for instance, has a peculiar correspondence to a crime committed, while the old woman is at once a harbinger of disaster for the journalist and factory owner, a figment of the monk’s dream, and also possibly a transformed version of one of the other characters in the film. These intricate connections and overlaps are not metaphorical, but have real and terrible consequences like iniquity, assault, cursedness and death. Like the partially autobiographical car accident that brackets the film, destiny hinges on a moment. For the viewer, this leads to a two-part realisation: not only does revelation arise from the way that the film has been structured to unfold, but every individual within it has a demonstrable effect upon the existence of others. The film thus expresses ‘karmic’ structure through the way the past, present and future events of its narrative affect each other until it becomes hard to tell them apart. Furthermore, the film’s characters – and even the entities within their own narrative inventions – are given agency to the extent that the stories, dreams, testimonies and recollections that they relate may themselves be changing reality even as they are being uttered. This is a powerful premise: that to tell something is to make it real.

Elaborating on the politics of aesthetics, Jacques Rancière states that “writing histories and writing stories come under the same regime of truth”.1 In other words, there is no distinction between the presentation of facts and the way that stories are invented, as models for creating fact and fiction have come to assume approximate if not identical structures of meaning-making. In the same way that the fictive consists of a combination of plausible arrangements of plot and archetype, history is now no longer ‘what happened’, but a series of elucidations by different parties about what they think really happened. Citing how documentary films, for instance, combine “different types of traces” such as interviews, archives, and documentation “in order to suggest possibilities for thinking this story or history,” Rancière concludes that “the real must be fictionalised in order to be thought”.2 This is nowhere more apparent than in Daniel Hui’s hybrid, experimental film SNAKESKIN (2014). Like several of the other festival offerings this year, the temporal and geographical logic of the film unfolds gradually, and turns out to be not what it initially seems. The framing narrative of the film is set in 2066, where the primary narrator is the sole survivor of a strange cult whose members all perished on an island many years ago. The leader of this cult was the narrator’s grandfather, who is also cast, among other things, as a descendant of colonialists, a fearsome prophet, and a transfiguring leader. Like many dystopian fictions, the film is rooted in details of history as well as the present, where we ‘trace’ footage of familiar city streets, partautobiographical, part-invented testimonies by interview subjects, and selected historical facts. While this structure means the film shares some 11

qualities of the so-called fiction documentary film or work of creative non-fiction, it is more interesting to see its narrative strategy as a way to unpack the politics of memory, and interrogate how the past can be made to “appear as simply a normalised modality of [the] present”.3 Three ‘founding myths’ structure the fable told in the film: the story of Sang Nila Utama, the founding of Singapore by Sir Stamford Raffles and the formation of the People’s Action Party, presently the dominant political party in Singapore, and in power since the country’s independence. While the sequence of these skeletal facts is not contested, SNAKESKIN, like Vanishing Point, interrogates causality through the logic of cinematic time. It proposes that our understanding of how we got to where we are, can be transformed by materially rearranging what we think we know, which would change the relationship between cause and effect, and irrecoverably alter the structure of meaning. However, the narrator warns us that these very same fragments that make up the film that the audience is looking at, are “evil when they are arranged in order”, though the nature of this darkness is never equivocally pronounced, in line with the film’s polyphonic perspectives. This notion of the ‘evil’ of making order out of fragmented materials returns us to Rancière, who describes how unchecked words that escape being controlled

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Film stills from SNAKESKIN

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and channelled by authorities toward the people they wish to address, may end up in free circulation. When this happens, these words will not be able to “produce collective bodies”, but will instead “introduce lines of fracture [. . .] into imaginary collective bodies”. Those in power might fear such a disorder, as it would “contribute to the formation of political subjects that challenge the given distribution of the sensible”.4 This then, is perhaps the real threat of this elusive ‘evil’, which is not so much that the fragments of history can be arranged in order, but rather, that they might be arranged in an order that is not accepted as established. The hope that this might happen, and the unfeasibility of it ever taking place, is symbolised by an enduring conceit in the film: time travel. It is never completely clear if the characters manage to achieve this gently utopic fantasy, which may be the only reasonable response in the face of an endless cycle of antecedence. Since it may not be possible to journey at will back and forth through time, the only way we have left to revisit the rigidity of history and the obduracy of truth is to obsessively circle around it, telling and re-telling these tales from as many perspectives as possible. Such a contrapuntal approach not only makes room for the co-existence of multiple temporalities and different historiographic scales, but also gives each their respective space to grow in power, scope and dimension.

Jacques Rancière. The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 34. Jacques Rancière. The Politics of Aesthetics, 34. Arjun Appadurai. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 31 Jacques Rancière. The Politics of Aesthetics, 36.

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Fri 10 Apr / 7:30pm

The Last Executioner Singapore Premiere Tom Waller, 2014, Thailand, 95 min Thai with English subtitles, M18 (Mature content) Post-screening discussion with director Tom Waller

Inspired by real events, this film tells the story of Chavoret Jaruboon, the last person in Thailand whose job was to execute death row prisoners with a machine gun, before the legislation of the lethal injection method in 2002. A wild rock-and-roller in his youth, Jaruboon becomes a state prison guard in a bid for stability and respectability. However, when he is appointed executioner, he is plunged into a never-ending conflict between his morality and his duty. How is it possible to reconcile the good karma that comes from being a dedicated family man and employee, and the bad karma that comes from being a killer? Showing life at its most beautiful and death at its most surreal, this film features a powerful performance by Vithaya Pansringarm.

Tom Waller is Bangkok-born and of Thai Buddhist and Irish Catholic heritage. He has produced films for 12 years, including Soi Cowboy (2008), which was selected for Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival. His film Mindfulness and Murder (2011) was nominated for five Thai National Film Awards including Best Director and Best Film. His most recent film The Last Executioner (2014) premiered in competition at the Shanghai International Film Festival, where it won the Best Actor Golden Goblet for lead Vithaya Pansringarm.

Director’s Statement I first read about Chavoret Jaruboon in his Bangkok Post obituary in May 2012. What struck me was that he was clearly an ordinary man who led an extraordinary life. For a man who wanted to be a rock ‘n’ roll singer, becoming a prison executioner would seem like an unlikely vocation. This is a person who went from holding a guitar to holding a gun – it was as if at times, he was living a double life. In his later years, he even became a minor celebrity in Thailand as a guest on game shows and chat shows, celebrated for performing his duties in taking the lives of 55 condemned prisoners. Perhaps for Chavoret, this was fame for all the wrong reasons. But yet he was a man who had led his life with a sense of duty, pride and diligence for his job, not once questioning why or how the condemned came to end up on death row. How does a man given such a task of taking so many lives reconcile

with his belief in karma? This was initially what interested me most in making this film. However, after speaking to his widow and family, I realised there were different layers to him. Not only was he a dutiful servant of the state but he was also a wonderful husband and a loving family man. After all, raising his family was, in many ways, the reason he became an executioner. It paid more bills than playing the guitar would have, but it ultimately led to him living with demons inside his head. Often troubled by these ‘spirits’ that haunted him, Chavoret turned to monks for moral guidance, seeking to make amends for his acts of killing. Don Linder’s screenplay tells the story of Chavoret’s extraordinary life with much panache, illustrating his inner turmoil and conflicted efforts to reconcile with his karma.

Print source: De Warrenne Pictures Co. Ltd Contact: [email protected]

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Sat 11 Apr / 5:00pm

The Search for Weng Weng Singapore Premiere Andrew Leavold, 2013, Australia/Philippines, 96 min English and Tagalog with English subtitles, PG13 (Brief nudity) Post-screening discussion with director Andrew Leavold and producer Daniel Palisa

This film is part of the festival sidebar Action Asia: The Wild Wild Years of Asian Film Action.

Standing just under 85 centimetres, Weng Weng was a Filipino James Bond who was adept at karate chops, machine-gun wielding, and the art of wooing a woman. An enigma even to those who have worked with him, his cinematic reign as the midget Agent 00 was an outrageous novelty that plucked him from complete obscurity and then returned him to it just as quickly. What was he like? When and how did he pass away? Leapfrogging from one eccentric character to the next, this documentary features directors, producers, actors, stuntmen, dwarf waiters, and even Imelda Marcos herself, each with their unique place in Filipino cinema. Proving that reality sometimes really is stranger than fiction, this detective story is an engaging history of Filipino B-grade cinema and the business of film, power and politics.

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Photo by Cesar Hernando

Andrew Leavold owned and managed Trash Video, the largest cult video rental store in Australia, from 1995 to 2010. He is also a filmmaker, author, researcher, film festival curator (for the Brisbane International Film Festival and Melbourne Underground Film Festival), musician, TV presenter, and fan of genre cinema. His debut feature film was Lesbo A Go Go (2003) and he is the co-writer of action script Blood Red Sea, and the co-founder of production company Death Rides a Red Horse. He is completing a book called Bamboo Gods and Bionic Boys: A History of Pulp Filmmaking in the Philippines. Eight years in the making, The Search for Weng Weng is his latest film project.

Director’s Statement Back in the early 90s, watching a two-foot nine Filipino improbably named Weng Weng, as a miniature James Bond, punching someone in the nuts, and then running between their legs was, for me, one of those life-changing moments. Weng Weng and For Your Height Only hinted at a parallel universe filled with strange and exotic films just waiting to be uncovered. I was immediately hooked, but wanted to know more. Who was Weng Weng? Where did he come from, and what happened to him? Were there other Weng Weng films, and was he still alive? Not even the internet could shed light on what appeared to be a forgotten life. The obsession grew until 2006, when I was invited to a film festival in Manila. I went with a video camera in one hand, determined to uncover once and for all the mystery of Weng Weng. Weng Weng’s story, it turns out, is even more extraordinary than I could have ever imagined: real life secret agent and international superstar who beat George Lucas at the box office. The rest of the story was equally heartbreaking, bizarre,

and exhilarating. The Search For Weng Weng is part personal quest, gonzo travelogue, detective story, and Philippine B film history. The Pinoy B film was understandably ghettoised by its own academics, filmmakers and audiences alike as an entirely disposable and nutritionally empty confection. I must admit I sensed a certain degree of resistance and puzzlement to my initial burst of blissfully innocent and self-absorbed enthusiasm for Weng Weng and his fellow B film contemporaries. This, I discovered, after immersing myself more fully in their collective consciousness, is akin to Australia’s own ‘cultural cringe’, borne out of a post-colonial nation’s need for serious currency in high art filmic dialogue. Lo and behold! Weng Weng was under their very nose, a two-foot-nine time capsule, who reveals far more about their own pop cinema history than they ever imagined.

Print source: Death Rides A Red Horse (Andrew Leavold) Contact: [email protected]

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Sat 11 Apr / 7:30pm

Fluid Boundaries Singapore Premiere Mun Jeonghyun, Vladimir Todorovic and Daniel Rudi Haryanto, 2014, Indonesia/Serbia/Singapore/South Korea, 87 mins Bahasa Indonesia/Vietnamese/Korean/Afrikaans/Serbian with English subtitles, PG13 (Some mature content) Post-screening discussion with directors Vladimir Todorovic and Daniel Rudi Haryanto

In a series of video letters, a director from Indonesia, Korea and Singapore reflect on socio-political, cultural and geographical borders and share stories of people who cross them. Workers of different nationalities flock to Singapore to find a job, renewing their employment passes in Malaysia. Others find themselves frequently crossing the border demarcating East Timor and Indonesia. Desperate realities face an immigrant family in South Africa, while a person who is left behind in a Vietnamese refugee camp in Indonesia recounts his past. Another reminisces about tragic life of his uncle, who had to change his nationality from Joseon to Korean. What are the threads that tie these different individuals and their varied stories together? Through the lives of these people and the unpredictable twists of modern history, we witness the rigidity of borders melt away.

Mun Jeonghyun has been with P.U.R.N Production, an independent documentary production since 2003. His film Grandmother’s Flower (2007) won best documentary in the Busan International Film Festival and he was invited to the Berlin Film Festival Forum. His film Yongsan (2010), won an Award of Excellence in the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival. Vladimir Todorovic is an Assistant Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media, NTU, Singapore. His short film Silica-esc (2010) won Special Mention for the category of Computer Art at the Japan Media Arts Festival. His debut feature Water Hands premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival’s Bright Future section in 2011. He released his second feature Disappearing Landscape in 2013. Daniel Rudi Haryanto was born in Semarang, Central Java, 1978. In 1999, he helped to establish Cinema Society, an organisation focused on Indonesian cinema studies and research. His feature documentary Prison and Paradise (2010) won the Director Guild of Japan award at the Yamagata Documentary International Film Festival 2011 and a Special Mention at the 8th CinemAsia Film Festival 2015.

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Directors’ Statement The three of us kept meeting at various festivals. We started thinking about possible topics and what we could do to facilitate the collaboration between the different countries where we live: South Korea, Singapore and Indonesia. After a while, we came up with the idea of using video letters that we would send to each other, and in that way, create a flowing narrative. We are interested to explore how our story changed

based on the collective storytelling method we used. By doing this film collaboratively, we not only discuss and showcase the topic of ‘fluid boundaries’ and the life surrounding those people, but also in the process, create a fluid interaction between ourselves. We hope this will show and symbolise the way we interact across our own borders.

Print source: CinemaDal Distribution Department (Hyejin Lee) Contact: [email protected]

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Sun 12 Apr / 3:00pm

The Look of Silence Singapore Premiere Joshua Oppenheimer, 2014, Denmark/Finland/Indonesia/Norway/UK, 99 min Bahasa Indonesia and Javanese with English subtitles, NC16

The 2012 documentary The Act of Killing was a troubling, surreal look at a forgotten chapter of Indonesian history: the killing of more than one million alleged communists, ethnic Chinese and intellectuals following the overthrow of the government by the military in the 1960s. This film delves deeper into this dark legacy, but focuses this time on the perspective of the victims rather than the victors of history. Village optometrist Adi’s older brother was one of these victims, and as he quizzes his patients about their memories of this violent era, he discovers the story of how his brother was murdered, and that some of his killers are still in positions of great power. Adi decides to confront each of them, asking them how they can possibly live side by side with their victims’ loved ones.

Joshua Oppenheimer is an American based in Denmark where he is a partner at the production company Final Cut for Real. Recipient of a 2014 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship, Oppenheimer has worked for over a decade with militias, death squads and their victims. His debut feature-length film, The Act of Killing (2012), won 72 international awards, including the European Film Award 2013, BAFTA 2014, Asia Pacific Screen Award 2013, Berlinale Panorama Audience Award 2013 and the Guardian Film Award 2014 for Best Film. His latest film, The Look of Silence (2014), premiered in competition at the 72nd Venice Film Festival, where it won five awards, including the Grand Prize of the Jury, the international critics award (FIPRESCI Prize), and the European film critics award (FEDEORA Prize). Oppenheimer is artistic director of the International Centre for Documentary and Experimental Film, University of Westminster.

Photos by Lars Skree @ Final Cut for Real

Director’s Statement The Act of Killing exposed the consequences for all of us when we build our everyday reality on terror and lies. The Look of Silence explores what it is like to be a survivor in such a reality. Making any film about survivors of genocide is to walk into a minefield of clichés, most of which serve to create a heroic (if not saintly) protagonist with whom we can identify, thereby offering the false reassurance that, in the moral catastrophe of atrocity, we are nothing like the perpetrators. But presenting survivors as saintly in order to reassure ourselves that we are good is to use survivors to deceive ourselves. It is an insult to survivors’ experience, and does nothing to help us understand what it means to survive atrocity, what it means to live a life shattered by mass violence, and to be silenced by terror. To navigate this minefield of clichés, we had to explore silence itself.

The result, The Look of Silence, is, I hope, a poem about a silence borne of terror – a poem about the necessity of breaking that silence, but also about the trauma that comes when silence is broken. Maybe the film is a monument to silence: a reminder that although we want to move on, look away and think of other things, nothing will make whole what has been broken. Nothing will wake the dead. We must stop and acknowledge the lives destroyed, and strain to listen to the silence that follows.

Print source: Cinephil (Philippa Kowarsky) Contact: [email protected]

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Sun 12 Apr / 5:30pm

Sparks

INTERNATIONAL Premiere

Giancarlo Abrahan, 2014, Philippines, 120 min Tagalog with English subtitles, M18 (Sexual scenes) Post-screening discussion with director Giancarlo Abrahan

It is summer. Jimmy and Issey are professors at the University of the Philippines who have been married for 25 years and are on the brink of separation. Jimmy’s research work is interrupted by an apparition who seems to be an ex-girlfriend, to whom he is equally haunted by and drawn to. Meanwhile, Issey goes on a creative writing retreat where she is mentoring young writers, and finds herself drawn to university student Gab. When one of Gab’s non-fiction pieces about his sexual awakening comes to widespread attention, a scandal ensues that puts everyone’s relationships under a spotlight. The virtuoso performances of Eula Valdez and Nonie Buencamino complement Abrahan’s deftly written, absorbing screenplay, and they are entirely convincing as two stillloving individuals enmeshed in the complexity of a decades-long relationship.

Giancarlo Abrahan is a producer, director, and writer. Primarily a screenwriter, Abrahan is noted for his screenplays for Hannah Espia’s Transit (Best Film, Cinemalaya IFF; Special Mention, Busan International Film Festival New Currents) and Whammy Alcazaren’s Islands (Cinema One Originals Film Festival 2013). His debut feature as director, Sparks, premiered at the 10th Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival, winning Best Director and Best Screenplay (for Abrahan) and Best Actress (for Eula Valdes). Also a creative director at production company TEN17P, he is developing as co-writer-producer and writer, two feature films with the support of the Asian Cinema Fund Script Development Fund.

Director’s Statement Sparks enters the world of the university and examines how the true, the good, and the beautiful pull the lives of teachers and students alike. It is an intelligent world trying to make sense of the ‘outside’ world. It is filled with people who keep thinking and thinking of the many contradictions in their lives. In the film, we see how even the most brilliant minds fail to comprehend this complexity, especially when love is in the picture. Love forces us to go against the world’s sense of

what is moral. The more we think about it, and the more we feel about it, the more we are forced to be untrue to ourselves. They say that it will all make sense with time. With Sparks, perhaps it is not about understanding. Years may pass, yet there are things that always remain a blur in our lives, like ghosts that never cease to haunt us at night. No matter how much we know of the world, there are pains that never make sense. It is the truth, it is a good thing, and it is beautiful that way.

Print source: TEN17P, Inc Contact: [email protected] (Giancarlo Abrahan) [email protected] (Hannah Espia)

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Fri 17 Apr / 7:30pm

Vanishing Point Singapore Premiere Jakrawal Nilthamrong, 2015, Netherlands/Thailand, 100 min Thai with English subtitles, M18 (Sexual scenes) Post-screening discussion with director Jakrawal Nilthamrong

The starting point of this experimental drama is a disastrous car crash that took place more than 30 years ago. The film then follows two characters whose lives intersect in tangential ways: an idealistic young journalist who accompanies police to crime scene reconstructions, and a factory owner in a border town, who is experiencing some family problems. Along the way we meet his teenage daughter, a motherly sex worker, a dreaming monk, and the film slowly but surely reaches its denouement. Wending through visions, tall tales and strange sceneries, this meditative work always returns to the notion of the karmic cycle and the idea that every action taken and decision made affects the course of one or many lives. Vanishing Point won the Hivos Tiger Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2015).

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Jakrawal Nilthamrong is an artist and filmmaker. His work spans short films, documentaries, video installations and feature films. The themes of his work often relate to Eastern philosophy in contemporary contexts, and the local history of specific environments, so as to establish dialogue among multiple perspectives. His shorts, documentaries and video installations have been shown in international film festivals including Rotterdam, Berlin, Toronto and Yamagata, as well as exhibitions including the Taipei Biennial 2012 and SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2014. He is currently a professor at Thammasat University, Thailand. Unreal Forest (2010) was his debut documentary feature and Vanishing Point (2015) is his second feature.

Director’s Statement 17 September 1983 was a seemingly ordinary day, except that it marked the moment when several lives in my family changed forever. It was the day that my parents were devastatingly wounded from a car accident. At that time, my father was a young military officer with a bright future ahead of him. He was driving back from a party one early evening to pick up the kids, with my mother sitting by his side. Inebriated, he stopped the car at a red light on top of one rail track where there was no barrier put in place. A train approached at full speed, hitting the car on the driver’s side and dragging what remained of the vehicle and its passengers for a long distance. The opening image of Vanishing Point is the front-page picture from the newspaper report of my parents’ accident that day. I grew up with that news photograph and my father’s fading memory of the day before the accident.

After several months in recovery, my mother resumed her normal life and work. But my father suffered from severe brain damage, and he could no longer return to the life he used to have. His dashing career suddenly came to a halt. This abrupt change had a big impact on my family. I cannot imagine how my life and my family would have turned out had there not been an accident that day. But all these experiences have made me who I am today. I invoke the story of my father, and merge it with other tales inside my head, into a story of two men who are mirror images of each other. Actions lead to consequences, and the karmic force has a pull on all men just like gravity has to earth.

Print source: Diversion (Mai Meksawan) Contact: [email protected]

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Sat 18 Apr / 5:00pm

Chasing Waves

World Premiere

Charliebebs Gohetia, 2015, Philippines, 92 min Visayan with English subtitles, PG (Some violence) Post-screening discussion with director Charliebebs Gohetia

Editor of Brillante Medoza’s early landmark works, Charliebebs Gohetia’s third directorial feature sees him return to the Southern Philippines. Set in remote community Panyan, the story opens when young Sipat’s family is forced by their landlord to leave the mountains – where he has spent his entire life – to migrate to the unfamiliar landscapes of the seaside. Nervous but excited, Sipat is convinced that his greatest dream of experiencing the beach will be fulfilled. As he counts down the days to his departure with his best friend En-En, he is unaware of what the future will hold. The semi-unexplored terrain of Barangay Tamugan with its peaks, caves, falls and rivers forms a dramatic backdrop to the natural, unaffected performances by the child actors.

Charliebebs Gohetia started editing films in 2005 when still a university student, working on Brillante Mendoza’s Masseur, The Teacher, Foster Child and Slingshot. He has edited for Filipino filmmakers including Adolf Alix, Jr., Joel Lamangan. Goheita’s debut feature The ‘Thank You’ Girls competed at the Vancouver International Film Festival and became a cult hit in the Philippines. His sophomore film The Natural Phenomenon of Madness (2011) screened at the BFI London Film Festival and the Vancouver International Film Festival and received five nominations at the 2012 Gawad Urian 2012 including Best Picture and Best Screenplay. His documentary, How to Make a Visayan Chopsuey (2014) won Special Jury Mention in October at the 1st Cine Totoo Philippine International Documentary Film Festival. His recent films are Love and Everything After and Chasing Waves.

Director’s Statement There is an unsettling contrast between the city-dwellers’ obsession with materialism, and the simple hopes of the people in the countryside. While urbanites thrive on achieving comfort, people in the rural areas are rooted to what is basic, never longing for any excess. I have been to the mountainous regions of the southern Philippines where indigenous people live. They have a certain kind of sincerity that does not wither despite their lack of technology or civilisation, terms that are defined by urban standards. These people from the mountains,

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having no access to luxury, have simple dreams – like the story of these two children who have never experienced going to the beach. But they are being oppressed by greed from the otherwise civilised and ruling class. It is a sad reality, a continuous struggle. It is apparent then that the class divide is still apparent even in dreams and aspirations.

Print source: Charliebebs Gohetia Contact: [email protected]

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Sat 18 Apr / 7:30pm

Garuda Power: The Spirit Within Singapore Premiere Bastian Meiresonne, 2014, France/Indonesia, 77 min Bahasa Indonesia with English subtitles, NC16 (Some violence and gore)

This film is part of the festival sidebar Action Asia: The Wild Wild Years of Asian Film Action.

An incredible journey into Indonesia’s action films from their beginnings in the 1920s up to the latest international successes, this documentary is an insight into one of the less well-known cinematic action industries. Its colourful history is closely related to the country’s own annals of change and development, with the mythical heroes and spectacular set-pieces serving as escapism and indirect social critique while representing the popular desires of the tens of thousands of ordinary people who enjoyed them over the years. This film features hitherto unseen footage, rare images, unusual poster art and interviews with top actors Barry Prima, George Rudy and Willy Dozan, directors Awyl Ackari and Imam Tantowi and action choreographers including Edy Jonathan.

Bastian Meiresonne became interested in Asian cinema while studying film in Paris. He has written for many newspapers, magazines and collaborative works and has published a book about Japanese auteur Imamura Shohei. Meiresonne serves as consultant for several international film festivals, and is a long-time collaborator for the Vesoul International Film Festival of Asian Cinema (FICA). Garuda Power: The Spirit Within is his first feature documentary.

Director’s Statement I have been involved with Asian cinema for many years now and Indonesian film in particular. More than just a simple dive into Indonesia’s incredible movie history, Garuda Power is also intended as a portrayal of its people. I hope this first-ever documentary on this genre will be the starting point for many more exciting projects to come, while serving as an alarm call for a specialised part of cultural heritage that is fast-vanishing cultural heritage. I also hope you will enjoy viewing it as much as we loved shooting it.

Print source: Shaya Production (Julien Thialon) Contact: [email protected]

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Sun 19 Apr / 3:00pm

Aimless Singapore Premiere Pham Nhue Giang, 2013, Vietnam, 87 min Vietnamese with English subtitles, M18 (Sexual scene)

Pham Nhue Giang graduated from the Hanoi University of Cinematography and the Hanoi University of Architecture. Since her debut film, Le Petit Culi (1992), she has directed many award-winning TV series and feature films. Among them is The Deserted Valley (2001), which won the Silver Lotus Prize at the 13th Vietnam National Film Festival, the FIPRESCI Prize at the 52nd Melbourne International Film Festival, and Second Prize from the Vietnam Association of Cinematography. She has also won prizes for her 25-episode television series Hau Hoa (2007). The Real and the Ideal (2009) received the Golden Kite Award from the Vietnam Association of Filmmakers. For her film Mother’s Soul (2011), 12-year-old lead Phung Hoa Hoai Linh won the best actress award at the Dubai International Film Festival 2011.

Leaving their village to earn a living in the big city, Tham and Quy’s relationship soon suffers in the face of their impoverished conditions. Depressed Tham falls for the charms of Thuat, an urbane and sophisticated man. When Quy discovers Thuat’s secret, he embarks on a desperate search for his wife. An examination about the choices and risks faced by women, the film presents the urban environment as a place where independence and agency can be pursued, but in the face of constant turbulence and temptations. Can there be joy without material comfort? This film evokes Doi Moi (renovation) cinema, where changing contemporary sensibilities clash with restrictive hierarchies in a bewildering way. Aimless won the Silver Kite from the Vietnam Cinema Association (2013) and the Silver Lotus from the18th National Film Festival, Vietnam (2013).

Director’s Statement In modern society, money prevails in personal relationships, and people are lost in a pragmatic way of life. Only true love will bring them back to the right track.

Print source: Pham Nhue Giang Contact: [email protected]

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Sun 19 Apr / 5:30pm

K’na the Dreamweaver

International Premiere

Ida Anita del Mundo, 2014, Philippines, 85 min T’boli with English subtitles, PG Post-screening discussion with director Ida Anita del Mundo

The T’boli are one of the indigenous peoples of Southern Mindanao. This film tells the story of one of their legends, the princess K’na who grows up amidst a century-old clan war which has separated the T’boli people into two villages on the North and South banks of Lake Sebu. At a young age, K’na is trained in the art of traditional weaving using designs granted through dreams by the goddess of the abaca plant. When she becomes the village’s dreamweaver, her father arranges a marriage between her and the heir to the throne of the North so as to end the war. But K’na has fallen in love with childhood friend Silaw. As the wedding date draws near, a revolution brews among those who do not believe in the joining of the two royal clans.

Ida Anita del Mundo has an MFA in Creative Writing from De La Salle University, Manila. She writes for The Philippine Star’s Starweek Magazine and has been a fellow of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop and the Iyas National Writers’ Workshop. Del Mundo has been playing the violin since she was three years old, and is a member of the Manila Symphony Orchestra. Her debut feature K’na the Dreamweaver premiered at the 10th Cinemalaya Film Festival 2014 where it received a Special Jury Prize and the award for Best Production Design.

Director’s Statement K’na the Dreamweaver intertwines the T’boli tradition of t’nalak dreamweaving and the narrative of young princess K’na’s coming of age as she finds herself in the position to bring peace to her village and to put an end to an age-old clan war.

Though it may be interpreted as such, it is not intended to be a historical film, nor a political film, or even an advocacy film. It is a film made with sensitivity and reverence for T’boli beliefs and arts. At its core, K’na the Dreamweaver is simply an honest, sincere love story that becomes epic because of the vibrant T’boli culture and the majestic Lake Sebu in South Cotabato. With the seamless weaving of reality and fiction, the film evokes a fantasy world and aims to create a new Filipino legend.

Print source: Ida del Mundo Contact: [email protected]

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Fri 24 Apr / 7:30pm

Fundamentally Happy

World Premiere

Tan Bee Thiam and Lei Yuan Bin, 2015, Singapore, 60 min English and some Malay with English subtitles, NC16 (Mature theme) Post-screening discussion with directors Tan Bee Thiam and Lei Yuan Bin

Twenty years ago, Habiba and Eric were neighbours. When Eric revisits her home to find her still living there with her husband, what seems like a friendly reunion turns into the gradual revelation of a painful secret from the past. Winner of Best Production and Best Original Script at the 2007 Life! Theatre Awards, this chamber drama gets a film treatment by Singapore independents Tan Bee Thiam and Lei Yuan Bin, with the camera helmed by Christopher Doyle. With its wrenching psychodrama and scalpel-edged dialogue, the film’s moody cinematography and varied close-ups bring viewers further into the story’s heart of darkness, breaking down the distance of the stage and cinema’s fourth wall, and creating its own form of detachment. An unflinching look at the consequences of abuse, Fundamentally Happy explores without judgment or condemnation critical issues such as trust, memory, relationships and consent.

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Tan Bee Thiam is producer, director and editor with independent film collective 13 Little Pictures. He has produced Red Dragonflies (2010); Eclipses (2013) and SNAKESKIN (2014). He directed Kopi Julia, one of 13 short films selected by Apichatpong Weerasethakul for the Sharjah Biennale 2013. Founder of the Asian Film Archive, Tan edits the Cinemas of Asia journal and curates films for the Singapore International Festival of Arts. He has served as the jury at the Berlinale, Locarno and Golden Horse film festivals and in 2009, was honoured as a National University of Singapore Outstanding Young Alumni. Lei Yuan Bin is a director and cinematographer. His directorial debut White Days (2009) has screened to international audiences in Berlin, Rome, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong and Bangkok. Lei’s sophomore feature, documentary 03-FLATS (2014) has been described as “an absorbing, almost hypnotically arresting treatise”. As cinematographer, Lei has worked on As You Were (Liao Jiekai) and Haze (Anthony Chen). A founding member of 13 Little Pictures film collective, Lei was conferred the Young Artist Award in 2012 by the National Arts Council, Singapore’s highest award for young arts practitioners.

Directors’ Statement This is a film adaptation of Fundamentally Happy, a 2006 play by Haresh Sharma and Alvin Tan. We are greatly inspired by their work and feel strongly that the intersection of theatre and film can create new ways of experiencing both mediums. Just like Ingmar Bergman’s chamber films, we find ourselves drawn to the use of theatricality in film to allow the audience to vacillate between immersing themselves in, yet resisting the screen illusion. The audience is kept engaged, but at a critical distance.

We are interested in how the film unravels in a dissymmetry of the characters, Eric and Habiba’s respective recollections and recounting of what has taken place in the house. What is real and what is remembered are often mirror images – seemingly alike but also lateral opposites of each other. In making this film, we hope to examine the complex issue of sexuality with the grace of love.

Print source: 13 Little Pictures Contact: [email protected]

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Sat 25 Apr / 5:00pm

the perspective of those caught in that very uncomfortable crack between two phenomena that we celebrate so often: democratisation and globalisation. My pengamen (street singers) were feeling both these things very profoundly, but benefiting from neither.

JALANAN Daniel Ziv, 2013, Indonesia, 107 min Bahasa Indonesia with English subtitles, NC16 (Some coarse language)

About 7,000 buskers roam the streets of Jakarta, often jumping buses to perform for small donations. This documentary tells the story of three charismatic street musicians over a tumultuous five-year period in their own lives that coincides with political and social change in Indonesia. Easy-going Boni lives in a sewage tunnel with his wife, tapping on city power and water supplies. Rare female busker Titi balances her religious family’s demands with her job, and plans to return to school. Dreadlocked Ho’s specialties are antiestablishment songs, but he is also looking for a stable relationship. With their original compositions as soundtracks, the film traces the three musicians’ elusive quests for identity, autonomy and love in a turbulent city overrun by the effects of globalisation and corruption.

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Daniel Ziv was born and raised in Canada, and has been living and working in Jakarta since 1999, where he documents urban life in Indonesia’s bustling capital city as a writer, magazine editor and filmmaker. He is the founder and editor of the monthly Djakarta! The City Life Magazine, and the author of Jakarta Inside Out and Bangkok Inside Out. He previously worked in international humanitarian aid and development agencies, including UNICEF, USAID and UN-OCHA, and has a MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of London. JALANAN is his first feature-length film. The film won Best Documentary at Busan International Film Festival and Special Mention at the Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival, Indonesia (2013).

Director’s Statement I was drawn to the story of JALANAN not because of any ambition to become a filmmaker or a pre-meditated quest to find a ‘good topic’ for a documentary, but because one day on the streets of Jakarta, I stumbled across a gang of unique individuals whose amazing life story I could not ignore. It happened to contain everything a documentary filmmaker could ask for: contagious personalities; compelling social justice issues; individual struggles that shed light on universal issues; cheeky humour; a colourful urban subculture, and – as an added bonus – a built-in soundtrack of wonderful original music. When I started out on this project, I thought I was going to shoot a short film about the busker community, their work, their world, and their music. But over time it became clear to me that by witnessing their lives so intimately, I was also being exposed to a fascinating and quite important story about Indonesia, a sort of snapshot of the post-reformasi era from

Although the film contains moments of sadness, struggle and injustice, these are far outweighed by moments of engaging humour, catchy music, beauty and hope. This isn’t the type of documentary that feeds off tragedy. The stakes are not as high as in some stories – this is not about thousands of lives being threatened, nor are people dying every day in this community. And although living conditions for these buskers are very basic, this isn’t even about the poorest of the poor. Rather, JALANAN traces the lives of a forgotten, marginalised community that slips through society’s cracks. The dilemmas and conflicts here represent a huge segment of urban population in the developing world, easily tens of millions in the case of Indonesia, certainly hundreds of millions more across Asia. This film is meant to give them a voice, to raise awareness for their conditions and struggle. JALANAN aims to bring the audience into this colourful world as participants rather than merely gazing down upon it. Their story is also meant as a provocative mirror through which we, in the more affluent part of the world, can reflect on our own lives and values, learning from the day-to-day perspectives and wisdom of the characters in JALANAN. Ho’s favourite mantra – as he bids farewell to bus passengers after entertaining them (or outraging them) with his songs, is that “Life must be fully lived!” Print source: Monoduo Films (Juan Camilo Cruz) Contact: [email protected]

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Sat 25 Apr / 7:30pm

Jade Miners Asian Premiere Midi Z, 2015, Myanmar/Taiwan, 104 min Myanma Bhasa with English subtitles, PG13 (Some coarse language)

Jade is a prized gem across Asia, and Kachin state in Myanmar is a source of much of the world’s jade. However, hostilities between the Kachin Independence Army and the Myanmar army have led to the government-contracted corporations ceasing their operations, as the jade mines that spread over hundreds of kilometres become a war zone. Despite the risk of arrest or physical danger from the chaotic landscape, workers from all over Myanmar still flock to these deserted mines to dig illegally for jade, desperately hoping to find a piece that will transform their lives. Shot with the aid of locals, Midi Z has complied a sober and intimate social documentary that focuses on the daily lives of these labourers. 38

Born in Myanmar, Midi Z trained as an artist in Taiwan. His graduation film, Paloma Blanca, was acclaimed worldwide. One of his first short films, Hua-xin Incident (2008), was produced by Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Ang Lee. Midi Z’s first feature Return to Burma (2011) was in the Rotterdam International Film Festival Tiger Competition and the Busan New Currents Competition. His latest feature, Ice Poison (2014), premiered at the Berlinale, won Best Film at the Edinburgh Film Festival and represented Taiwan in the Best Foreign Film category at the Oscars. Jade Miners is his first documentary.

Director’s Statement As soon as you turn on the camera, reality disappears. As for documentary, I do not believe in reality; instead, I believe that reality can never be easily conveyed via any media. So in that case, why should I make a documentary? Perhaps it is a personal statement; it expresses what is hidden underneath these seemingly real images and what I have witnessed, including the never-changing nature of the game of survival that human beings have played since the dawn of time.

‘Civilisation’ for most people means nothing more than ‘a better life’. The lives of these miners around me are the epitome of a certain aspect of human history. Stories like theirs have been happening everywhere in the world, and the truth lies behind them is universal.

Print source: Seashore Image Productions (Isabella Ho) Contact: [email protected]

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Sun 26 Apr / 3:00pm

Justice Singapore Premiere Joel Lamangan, 2014, Philippines, 120 min Tagalog with English subtitles, R21 (Sexual scenes)

Erstwhile domestic worker Biring rises to become the right-hand woman of Vivian, who runs a human trafficking syndicate in Manila. Her job entails bribing the authorities to turn a blind eye to their illegal activities, which is not difficult when the bureaucracy is already corrupt. Even though her children refuse her money because of how it was made, Biring knows that in this line, it’s better to see no evil, hear no evil and look after only oneself. However, when she is framed for murder, she starts on a spiral of ever-deepening reprobation. When she has to make the stark choice of whether to be a victim or a victimiser, her transformation becomes complete. Filled with the harsh realities of society, this film features a bravura performance by superstar Nora Aunor that is replete with moral and psychological complexity.

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Joel Lamangan is a multi-awarded Filipino director who has trained and worked in the fields of film and theater in the Philippines and abroad. He acted and directed for stage and television and also took screen roles, before opting for film direction, making his debut in 1991 with Darna. Among his notable films are The Flor Contemplacion Story (1995) which won the Golden Pyramid award at the Cairo International Film Festival 1995 and Best Actress for Nora Aunor, Pusong Mamon (1998), Deathrow (2000), Hubog (2001), Huling Birhen sa Lupa (2003), Blue Moon (2006) and Deadline (2011).

Director’s Statement Justice is a story of how corruption has penetrated every part of the Philippine society. The film’s locale is Manila but it could very well be the story of the entire country. Corruption in the bureaucracy has penetrated from the highest to the lowest level of governance. Justice is a commentary on the social realities of the country through the female lead character embodying the different notorious personalities plaguing Philippine society.

Nora Aunor, the legendary actress of Philippine cinema gives life to the character of Biring – the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, talk-no-evil character, exploited and victimised until she herself has become the victimiser. It is a portrayal of a lonely worker in the human trafficking industry seeking to rise from the muck and vice of the criminal world, but to what end, it is not clear.

Print source: Ignatius Films Canada (Ferdinand Lapuz) Contact: [email protected]

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Sun 26 Apr / 5:30pm

So Be It Singapore Premiere Kongdej Jaturanrasmee, 2014, Thailand, 85 min Thai and Hmong with English subtitles, PG

Seven-year-old Thai-American student William becomes an overnight celebrity when he participates in a reality show that depicts his experiences in a Buddhist summer ordination programme. Meanwhile, 11-year old Bundit, who is from an ethnic minority hilltribe, starts on his own Buddhist journey as he is sent to a temple along with more than 2,000 children, where he chafes at the strict rules and being separated from his family. Both William and Bundit must learn in their own ways to pursue freedom of mind and self-control of spirit. In an age where organised religions are losing their shine, why and how does a young child choose of his own volition to become a monk? How do children who live in temples survive and what do they think of religious practice? The documentaryfiction hybrid film is a coming-of-age tale of two boys from vastly different backgrounds, who each have their own way of learning the meaning of Buddhism in daily life.

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Kongdej Jaturanrasmee is a veteran filmmaker and scriptwriter, and the writer and director of Sayew (2003), Midnight My Love (2005), and Handle Me with Care (2008). His film P-047 (2011) premiered at the Venice Film Festival 2011 while Tang Wong (2013) premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival 2013. As a scriptwriter, he has won awards and written the most successful Thai films of recent years including Tom Yum Goong (by Prachya Pinkaew), Queens of Pattani (by Nonzee Nimibutr), and Me…Myself and Happy Birthday (by Pongpat Wachirabanjong). He is widely known for his two hits including The Letter (2004), a remake of the 1997 Korean film Pyeonji and the Tony Jaa action movie TomYum-Goong (2005). Jaturanrasmee is a film professor at Assumption University in Thailand.

Director’s Statement What do we still need religions for? Thailand has always taken pride in being a center of Buddhism. It is a country where temples are established plentifully in every province. But today, we are flooded with shameful news regarding Buddhist monks in our media, until we begin to lose our faith. Furthermore, we live in an age where social media obsesses us. Anyone could become the prophet himself.

In the film, there are two ‘borderland’ boys who spend their lives in temples. One is half Thai and half-American. Another is a descendant from a hill tribe family. The first one has many opportunities in his life, but instead he chooses to seek and understand Buddhism. But the second one has no such choices and he must stay in the temple in order to survive in his life. Temple and Religion have become the tools for seeking answers in the respective paths of life for these two different boys.

Print source: Mosquito Films Distribution (Supatcha Thipsena) Contact: [email protected]

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Fri 1 May / 7:30pm

SNAKESKIN Asian Premiere Daniel Hui, 2014, Portugal/Singapore, 105 min English, Rating to be advised Post-screening discussion with director Daniel Hui

It is the year 2066, and the sole survivor of an enigmatic cult recounts his country’s traumatic history and the events that led to the rise and collapse of this cult. As he reminiscences, ghosts from 2014 and the years before appear as witnesses. Part dream documentary, part city symphony, this hybrid film traces the lineage of oppression as inscribed both in Singapore’s physical landscape, as well as its collective unconscious. The personal recollections of different characters are interspersed with scenes of familiar settings and places. Loosely binding this chorus together is a narrative voice-over that reflects on the nature of history, showing the richness of all that is forgotten, erased, subjective and polymorphic. This unusual film is a thoughtful look at the legacy and future of this strange Southeast Asian island.

Daniel Hui is a filmmaker and writer. A graduate of the film/video programme in California Institute of the Arts, his films have been screened at film festivals in Rotterdam, Hawaii, Manila, Seoul, Bangkok, and Vladivostok. Hui is also one of the founding members of the independent 13 Little Pictures film collective, whose works have garnered international critical acclaim. His debut feature film, Eclipses, won the Pixel Bunker Award for International New Talent at the Doclisboa International Film Festival 2013. His second feature film, SNAKESKIN, won the Special Jury Prize at the Torino Film Festival in 2014. He is also a contributing editor to the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC) online journal, Cinemas of Asia.

Director’s Statement The 1950s is a fascinating era in Singapore’s history. It was a time when Singapore had the most vibrant film industry in the region. It was also a time of great political upheaval. Watching the cinema of this era, I have always found many parallels between its ideals and the ideals of activists and politicians at that time. Both wanted a racially-integrated society that is independent and egalitarian.

Unfortunately, a lot of this history has been either forgotten, erased, or rewritten. This film is dedicated to the people who have fallen through the gaps of history. Their ghosts remain with us, in our dreams, in our hallucinations, in our unconscious. In the deep of the night, when the ring of money has died down, we can still hear their voices warning us of the future to come.

Print source: 13 Little Pictures Contact: [email protected]

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Sat 2 May / 5:00pm

2030

Singapore Premiere Nghiem-Minh Nguyen-Vo, 2014, Vietnam, 98 min Vietnamese with English subtitles, M18 (Sexual scene)

Director’s Statement The horizon, where the land and sea meet, is a curve that follows the surface of the earth. However, at a relative small scale familiar to humans, the horizon is also a straight line that becomes a reference for stability, something that we all cling to because we know how to keep balance in that space. It gives us comfort because it appears as the absolute truth in life. But the absolute truth is not always available in life. Water plays a strong visual role in this film. The horizon, the intersecting line between water and the atmosphere, appears as the perfect horizontal line to the human eye. It appears prominently in the beginning as a metaphor for the absolute balance and truth in life.

Set in the vast and beautiful coastal regions of southern Vietnam, this dystopic film envisions a near future when water levels have risen to swallow farmlands due to global climate change. The Vietnamese people must now live in houseboats and rely solely on rapidly-depleting fishing grounds for food. As vegetables are now highly priced commodities, huge multinational conglomerates are competing to build floating farms equipped with desalination and solar power. Amidst all this is fisherwoman Sao, who was briefly involved with visiting science researcher Giang before her marriage. However, when her husband Thi is murdered, Sao sets out to discover the truth and is forced to make a dramatic decision. This atmospheric maritime mystery highlights the creative and destructive force that is water. 46

Nghiem-Minh Nguyen-Vo was born in Vietnam, and frequented his small town’s only movie theatre as a way to escape the atrocities of the Indochina conflict. Emigrating to France to study aeronautical engineering, he continued to the US where he became a physicist. In 1998, his passion for cinema led him to pursue a programme in screenwriting and directing, and his directorial debut, Buffalo Boy, was Vietnam’s entry to the 2006 Academy Awards. It won 15 awards around the world including the New Directors’ Silver Hugo Award at the Chicago International Film Festival, the FIPRESCI Jury Award at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, and the Youth Jury Award at the Locarno International Film Festival. His latest film 2030 opened the Panorama section of the Berlin International Film Festival 2014.

The search for the absolute truth in global climate change is still going on. What causes the seawater level to rise? Many scientists have argued that it is due to the greenhouse effect, the consequence of the development of science and technology since the industrial revolution. Others disagree, arguing that the global climate change is caused by either a natural fluctuation in thermal balance or by the additional tilt of the earth’s axis from its normal position that has nothing to do with human activities. But the dreadful effects of this global change have been felt by many people with probably much more destructive power to come in the near future. Should we attempt to do something immediately to deal with the effect of the rising sea? Or should we do nothing while waiting for the absolute truth?

If we decide to act, it seems to be natural that science and technology play a role in offering the solution. Besides curbing of the emission of greenhouse gases that is a long-term solution, something else has to be done right away about the imminent shortage of food due to the loss of agricultural land and fresh water sources. Floating farms can resolve the shortage of land, and techniques such as desalination or evaporation can provide fresh water needed for cultivation. However, a lower-cost solution could be provided by manipulating the genes in food plants, allowing them to grow with salt water or even in salt water. Are these genetic engineered plants safe for human consumption? Throughout human history, we had developed and consumed a great deal of genetically altered foods. However, the change of food consumption had happened over many thousands of years where the body had enough time to adapt. The present change to modern genetically engineered foods is happening in a much shorter time and will stretch the limit of human adaptability. Using chaos theory, one has to accept the implicit long-term unpredictability from the same initial condition. It means pushing the human mind to the limit of its intelligence. Ultimately, our ways of coping could change us, and there’s no way to know for sure. Yet we must forge ahead.

Print source: Premium Films (Kasia Karwan) Contact: [email protected]

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Sat 2 May / 7:30pm

Riddles of My Homecoming

International Premiere

Arnel Mardoquio, 2013, Philippines, 82 min No Dialogue, R21 (Sexual scenes and violence) Post-screening discussion with assistant director Yam Palma

One of the most experimental narratives yet to speak of the conditions of exploitation and poverty in southern Philippines, this film is a visual tapestry of evocative symbols, choreography and landscapes. Alfad’s dream is to work abroad. Swallowed by the sea, his soul returns to the island of his birth where he finds his memories on its shore. Aliya is a young girl who represents the spirit of the new day and the uncertainty of the future. When they return to their homeland, they find it destroyed and the people searching for a divine presence to save them, which emerges in the form of old Wahab, ruler of a strange cult. However, female shaman Mariposa and rebel woman farmer Mayka join forces to confront him. A poetic exploration of the labyrinth of tragedies and anatomy of violence in Mindanao, this film won Best Director, Best Cinematography and Grand Jury Prize at the Cinema One Originals Film Festival (2013).

Arnel Mardoquio was born and works in Davao City, Mindanao, in the Philippines. He has won the grand prize at the literary Palanca Awards, and was also awarded Best Director and garnered a nomination for Best Screenplay at the Gawad Urian for his films Earth’s Whisper (2008) and Hospital Boat (2009). His film Sheika (2010) won Best Screenplay, Best Actress and Best Editing at the 34th Gawad Urian Awards and received NETPAC awards at the Cinemalaya Independent Film Festival 2010. The Journey of the Stars into the Dark Night (2012) won Best Film at the Gawad Urian Awards 2013, Best Screenplay at the Young Critics Circle 2013 and the Grand Jury Prize at both the Cinema One Originals Film Festival 2012 and at Cinemanila IFF 2012. Riddles of My Homecoming (2013) won the Grand Jury Prize, Best Director, Best Cinematography at the Cinema One Originals Film Festival 2013. Alienasyon (2014), his latest feature, won the Jury Prize and Best Cinematography at the Gawad Tanglaw Awards 2014.

Director’s Statement I make films for my country, and when I say ‘country’, I am referring to Mindanao. This standpoint plays a very important element in my craft as a storyteller. In my earnest desire to contribute something worthwhile to our historical development, my films promote the identities of the Mindanaoans. The Poor-Deprived-Oppressed Mindanaoans play heroes and heroines in my stories. While my films promote the richness and diversity of our people and culture, it does not promote tourism and it does not talk about the beauty and the goodness of our region – my film speaks about the truth in Mindanao. Riddles of My Homecoming is very rich in images. The narrative of the film is enveloped with many signs and symbols. The theme

revolves around the belief of Lumad (natives) about one soul that returned to his birthplace to serve as the place-keeper, a guardian to the land, mountains and waters. The film’s setting and time is not fixed, yet the characters meet at different times and realities in their lives. The dramatic timeline of this film is so complex that it is so immersed into the fantastic world of the Lumad, yet the film also tries to pull us into a homogenous time. In making this film, every time I peep in the camera, I don’t look for the ‘beautiful shot.’ I confirm the correctness of visual interpretation, or the manner by which one temporal reality is captured, according to the dramatic timeline that I have to fulfill.

Print source: Creative Programs Inc (Ronald Arguelles) Contact: [email protected]

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Sun 3 May / 3:00pm

Wukan: The Flame of Democracy Lynn Lee and James Leong, 2013, Singapore, 90 min Mandarin with English subtitles, NC16 (Mature content)

Wukan, a village in southern China, captured international attention in 2011 when demonstrators took to the streets to rebel against decades of corrupt rule. In the face of insurmountable odds, the village committee fell and democratic elections were announced. Wukan’s residents then found themselves grappling with the challenges of a new political system: former rebel leaders now had to run the village, respond to the demands of the electorate, and deal with provincial and county authorities. This intimate documentary portrait of a rural Chinese community mirrors the complex mix of challenges, euphoria, hopes and hard realities facing fledgling democracies across the world. The film was given Special Mention at the 2013 Dubai Film Festival and won first prize at the 2014 Human Rights Press Awards in Hong Kong.

Lynn Lee and James Leong are filmmakers who have spent the last decade making documentaries across Asia. Their first feature documentary Passabe (2005) was a grant recipient from the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund and was acquired by ARTE. Their second film, Aki Ra’s Boys (2006), won two international awards, while their third, Homeless FC (2007), received the Grand Prize at the Chinese Documentary Festival. Their documentary The Great North Korean Picture Show (2012) has screened at film festivals across the world. Lee and Leong have also made numerous television documentaries, including Nowhere to Go, an investigative piece for Al Jazeera English, which won the First Prize at the 2013 Human Rights Press Awards.

Directors’ Statement We rooted for Wukan when we first learnt about its struggle: a fishing village in Southern China, rising up against decades of corrupt rule and illegal land grabs by its local leaders. Thanks to social media, breathtaking images of the revolt were widely circulated online – thousands of angry villagers waving placards and banners, chanting slogans, standing their ground even as authorities threatened a crackdown. News that they had ousted their Village Committee and won government approval to hold unprecedented democratic elections made headlines all over the world. It was arguably, one of the biggest stories to emerge from China in 2011, a story celebrating a people’s tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds.

But what happens after an uprising? In early 2011, as Wukan prepared to hold landmark elections, we ventured into the village to find out. What followed was a truly unforgettable year. For the former activists elected to the Village Committee, it was also a difficult one – fraught with risk, frustration and heartache. Democracy, we’ve all learnt, is a complicated thing. We are grateful to Wukan’s villagers and their Village Committee for letting us witness their remarkable journey, for opening their homes and hearts to us. The story, we know, is still unfolding, and we plan to keep following it. Despite all the disappointment and disillusionment, we know that the struggle for a better Wukan continues.

Print source: Lianain Films (Lynn Lee) Contact: [email protected]

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Sun 3 May / 5:30pm

NOVA Singapore Premiere Nik Amir Mustapha, 2014, Malaysia, 106 min Bahasa Malaysia and some English with English subtitles, NC16 (Some drug use)

Filmmaker Berg, obsessed with an unidentified blob he saw in the sky when he was a student, reunites his old friends on a whim, calling them to go on a road trip for old times’ sake, while capturing this alien spacecraft on film. Despite their doubts about this shaky premise, and Berg’s filmmaking abilities and drug habit, they all agree to go on this expedition, as each of them have their personal reasons for doing so. As they reminisce about their old school days, tension arises as they start to disagree on what happened back then. This chase for this elusive UFO becomes more than what it seems. A quirky genre mash-up of comedy, sci-fi, road-trip and buddy movie, this engaging film contains several homages to Malaysian cinema. 52

Nik Amir Mustapha was trained in engineering but became a filmmaker after pursuing training in the medium. His first feature film, Kil (2013) won Best Film, Best Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress in the Malaysian Screen Awards 2013. The film also won Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best New Actress at the Malaysian Film Festival 2014. NOVA (Terbaik Dari Langit) is his second feature.

Director’s Statement After my first feature, I found myself wanting to make a film that focuses on matters close to my heart. I wanted to reflect my Malaysian roots in the film. Having spent my youth in a boarding school, I recalled the camaraderie that was formed and the way that friendships evolved. I was also at a point where I had my principles tested where I had to face the pressure to conform to society. At the time, I felt a need to have a voice in the local Malaysian filmmaking scene. With all these ideas in mind, I developed a strong will to explore these topics and that was how NOVA came into existence.

Personally I feel that having all these different genres in the movie inspired a lot of people working on the project. It sparked something in our film-making minds. The takeaway for filmmakers who watch it is that you can use anything and create anything as long as you make sure you do it with heart.

Print source: Astro Shaw Sdn Bhd (Alea Rahim) Contact: [email protected]

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About the Curators

Philip Cheah is a film curator and film critic. He is Vice-President of Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC) and serves as Consultant for the AsiaPacificFilms.com, the Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival, Cinema Digital Seoul Film Festival and the Dubai International Film Festival. He is co-editor of the books Garin Nugroho – And the Moon Dances, Noel Vera’s Critic After Dark and Ngo Phuong Lan’s Modernity and Natioanlity in Vietnamese Cinema. He is also the editor of BigO, Singapore’ only independent pop culture publication. As a founding member of the Singapore International Film Festival, he was the Programmer and Director from 1987 to 2010. He was awarded the Asian Cinema Prize in 2006 at 8th Cinemanila International Film Festival for his contribution to Asian film.

Teo Swee Leng is a veteran arts administrator and consultant and has worked in the local arts and film community for the past 28 years. She was festival director of the Singapore International Film Festival 54

from 1991 to 2007 and the administrator for TheatreWorks from 1985 to 1989. She was the executive producer of ISEA2008, and works as consultant on projects including Conference for Network For The Promotion of Asian Cinema, AsiaPacificFilms.com, Singapore Biennale 2013, Lien Fung’s Colloquium, National Museum of Singapore Cinematheque, THIS Buddhist Film Festival, and Alexander Street Press.

Sam I-shan is a curator at Singapore Art Museum focusing on new media, photography and film. Her exhibitions include part of Still Moving: A Triple Bill on the Image and the Asia Pacific Breweries Foundation Signature Art Prize 2014. She was also curator for Artist Films (2011 – 2012) and co-curator for the Southeast Asian Film Festival (2011 – 2015). She was co-curator for the AiRX Artist-in-Residence Programme 2012/13, which was supported by the Singapore International Foundation and the British Council, and an award recipient of the JENESYS Programme for Creators Residency 2012 in Japan.

About Singapore Art Museum The Singapore Art Museum (SAM) focuses on contemporary art practice in Singapore, Southeast Asia and Asia within the global context. It advocates and makes accessible interdisciplinary contemporary art through research-led and evolving curatorial practice. Opened in January 1996, SAM has built up one of the most important collections of

contemporary art from the region. It seeks to seed and nourish a stimulating and creative space in Singapore through exhibitions and public programmes. These encompass cross-disciplinary residencies and exchanges, research and publications, as well as outreach and education. SAM was the organiser of the Singapore Biennale in 2011 and 2013. SAM was incorporated as a Company Limited by Guarantee on 13 November 2013 and has moved from the National Heritage Board to the Visual Arts Cluster (VAC) under the Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth (MCCY). The other institutions under the VAC are the National Gallery, Singapore and STPI. 55

General Information SAM is located at 71 Bras Basah Road, Singapore 189555. SAM’s annexe, SAM at 8Q, is located at 8 Queen Street, Singapore 188535.

Cover Image: Film still of The Look of Silence Photo by Lars Skree @ Final Cut for Real Writeups by Sam I-shan and Philip Cheah

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