Production Talk － ‘Forever' by Wee Li Lin

JOEY, a video consultant from W.E.D (wedding education department), dedicates herself to promoting romance and lasting marriages to young Singaporeans through her unique videos. Now she is about to fulfill her own dream with GIN, a handsome music teacher whom she has been in a whirlwind romance with after casting him along side with her in a W.E.D video.

When Joey announces her upcoming wedding to Gin, her colleagues at W.E.D. are surprised; none of them has ever met Gin in person or heard of him until the video. But they are happy, as Joey was the only unmarried staffer at W.E.D. While Joey’s star is rising at W.E.D, the path to her own wedding is elusive. Joey gets stood up by Gin on her birthday and finds him out and about with a beautiful girl, CECILIA.

Crushed, Joey is desperate to find out what’s going on only to be met with rejection and refusal.

Is Joey delusional, in need of psychiatric help? Or is Gin just an irresponsible ex-fiancé who needs to be brought to justice? Either way, Joey’s unrelenting pursuit of Gin throughout shows us to what lengths a heart will go to get what it wants and if indeed, there is a winning formula to make love happen under any circumstances.

'Forever' on Screen Daily

About the Director

A graduate of Brown University (Class of '96) in America , with a BA in Art Semiotics, Li Lin also spent a semester in NYU doing “Sight and Sound”, an intensive filmmaking production course. Since her graduation she has been working in Singapore as a freelance television producer/director. She's an avid short filmmaker and has done several short films in Singapore so far, three of which have been award winners at the Singapore International Film Festival and two have won awards at American Film Festivals. In January last year the Singapore Film Society organized a retrospective of all her work for members and the public. This event was a first ever SFC retrospective of a local short filmmaker. In 2004, the Singapore history museum (in conjunction with the Substation) organized another retrospective of her work.

Since the middle of 2004, Li Lin has been hard at work on her first feature film "Gone Shopping" which was released in July 2007.

Taken from: http://www.aweething.com/index.html

*****

Grace (G): What inspired you to start on this project?
Li Lin (LL): A few years back I met a lady client who was involved in the promotion of marriage. She was intelligent and attractive but turned out to be anti-romance after her fiancé jilted her. I liked the irony such a character presented and the potential for a comedy that could be weaved around her.

Jeremy (J): It sounds like Her World/Female/CLEO on film. Do you intend it to be a very womanly film for gals?
LL: You can call it a romantic comedy with a twist or a psycho chick flick, as one of my friends puts it. I hope to be able to expand the horizon of the chick flick genre and also to expand on the type of females represented in singapore films.

G: How long did you take to make this film from the time pre-production started?

LL: From concept to the final shooting script, it took us 18 months starting from early 2008. After putting the finance in place and locking down the cast, we started the shoot in late November 2009. We finished the shoot in January 2010.

J: How did you manage to get Mo Tzu Yi to star in your film? And why is he your choice given that this film is set in Singapore?
LL: It’s always our plan to have our main cast consisting of both Singapore and foreign talents. We were really taken with Mo Tzu Yi’s quiet magnetism and boyish good looks when we had the opportunity to meet him. His film work in Taiwan is going from strength to strength and we were very happy that he really liked the story and the character of Gin. This is his first non-Taiwanese film. So we're honored.

G: Tell us more about "Forever" as a romantic comedy.
LL: "Forever" is about a woman following her heart at all costs and in our protagonist Joey's case at outrageous, wacky costs, which we hope the audience will find funny!


J: Do you have particular types of genres/settings/premises that interest you? I notice from your previous films, you have a keen eye on contemporary life of the middle to upper-middle class / executive types of Singaporeans, which is a breath of fresh air from the gritty, depressed stories we see from so many others.
LL: Thanks. I really enjoy satire and comedy but they are hard to do and i'm still learning. I tend to veer towards American films, as that's what i grew up watching plus I went to an American university where i did some film courses. American mainstream films tend to be more optimistic and idealistic, so that did rub off on me. But I also watched quite a number of American indie films during my uni days which were darker and more subversive and that also rubbed off on me.

J: I understand Charles, your husband, an artist himself has a significant contribution to the film. What was his contribution and how was it like working with him on the set? (especially when it is coincidental that the film is about love and marriage)
LL: Charles stepped in as my art director when all other options came to naught. We were both concerned about this arrangement as we have never worked so closely before but Charles is very talented and worked very hard on the film. He understands my humor and his level of commitment and quest for perfection is inspiring. Husband and wife team projects are tricky and we definitely had our challenging days, esp as Charles has never worked on a feature film set and I often expected him to know how to run things like a 'pro'. But we want to go through it again!

G: What are your views on the film industry here in Singapore?
LL: I think the Singapore film industry is growing at a steady pace but Singapore audiences are not growing at the same speed. The only local films that make it seem to need alot of money backing them in terms of A&P but most local films wont have that kind of money to spend.

G: Give us more insight to your upcoming works
LL: Im working on a play / film hybrid with one of my best friends, playwright Jean Tay, and I'm also working on my third feature concept.

Forever is scheduled to open in Singapore through Golden Village towards the end of 2010. Watch out for it!

Meet the producer of 'The Crying Game' on Mon 8th March

(very 70s) Photo of Nik Powell

Nik Powell, producer of such classic films as The Company of Wolves, Mona Lisa and The Crying Game, will be in Singapore in March and sharing the ups and downs of the life of a film producer in a special session at the National Museum, organised by Ngee Ann Polytechnic's School of Film & Media Studies, Chapman University Singapore and the British Council.

In 30 Lessons Of A Producer: The Gospel According To Nik Powell, Nik will be taking a light hearted look at his career as both an entrepreneur and a film producer and the lessons that he has learnt. This should be an eye-opener!

When:  7.30 pm – 9.00 pm, Monday 8th March 
Where: National Museum of Singapore

This is a CLOSED event for the film industry but the BC have 5 pairs of tickets to give away. For a chance to win, email arts@britishcouncil.org.sg, citing NIK SINDIE in the subject line.

Gala Nights 2 : 'The Gang' Bang

For some reason, Maia resembles Roxie Hart from 'Chicago' the musical.

'My Gawd, I can't believe they invited these people!'

SINdie is part of 'industry' and not 'friends'...lol
Aishah from Substation gives a cheeky look, 'Blood Ties' director Chai Yee Wei looking like a secondary school student behind.

'Say cheese!' the photographer instructs the cast, who have not met all in the team until tonight because they appear in different scenes.

Grace and Jeremy take the quintessential photo with 'The Man' behind everything, Kelvin Sng (middle)

Notice the tattoo on her left arm. Could 'The Gang' spark off a comeback trend of full-body tattoos?

The Cathay Cineplex was awash with starsgazers. Two local movies were premiering at the same time - Kelvin Sng's 'The Gang' and Harry Yap's 'Happy Go Lucky'. It was nauseating trying to decipher where the stargazers were gazing. Of course, when Fann Wong made an appearance with a kooky-looking Christopher Lee, people flocked to them like bees to honey. But for the rest of the occasion, 'The Gang' maintained its glory with an event that reached new heights of grandiosity for short films. I (Jeremy) was getting a little worried for Kelvin for if the film itself would not live up to the hype (almost circus-like)in the run up to the screening. But thankfully, the film left most of the audience with nothing to say except words of congratulations in their different configurations.

Gala Nights 1 : When Night Fa11s

Director of the Film:Derrick Lui

Introduction of Director and Casts
(From Left)Derrick Lui,Jessica Tan,Jeszlene Zhou(strategically positioned),Desmond Tan




http://www.whennightfalls-film.com/

Extinct Singapore Films

This is a response to the Nearly got FOOLED on This,dated on Feb 17,2010.

The 1st impression that it gives me is that it is a series of old movie remastered into a DVD. But to my disappointment,in the DVD case,it is an empty case.

I was initially wowed by the DVD and thought "eh, CD-rama is a great store selling exclusive old movies in DVD,but got to know from the brochure that the 5 films on the case are old films which are "lost".

This is not real,but it is a Campaign.

This is a campaign as part of Asian Film Archive's 5th Anniversary and the ‘Save Our Film’campaign aims to raise awareness of Singapore's rich local film heritage and the importance of keeping it alive for our future. Targeting youth aged 15 to 35, the initiative shows them the value of local films and encourages them to seek out local film memories from their elders,thereby using local films to breach the generation gap through collective film memories.

Here are some events that are of the past and upcoming

1. 'Save Our Film' posters have been put up at Shaw, Filmgarde and Cathay cineplexes, the Substation and Sinema Old School until the end of February when the campaign ends.
Also,'Save Our Film' DVDs have been placed on the shelves of HMV, selected Popular CD-Rama and Gramophone outlets and Sinema Old School.These posters and DVDs promote five early Singapore film titles, with the twist that these films are lost. The public can share information they have on these and other missing films on the campaign website's Singapore Lost Films Wiki.

2. From 6 to 27 February, flash mob style 10-minute video projections will be screened at mystery locations every Saturday. The video features interviews with prominent community members who share their best film memories. Some of these personal tributes include Baba Peter Wee, First Vice-President of the Peranakan Association, whose grandfather owned the Alhambra and Marlborough theatres, Wong Han Min, a Singapore film memorabilia collector and Willy Why, former cameraman for Cathay-Keris Films with over 45 years of filmmaking experience.

3. Singaporeans are invited to share their film memories in the first-ever public Call for Memories. This can be done by recording a video of themselves or others sharing their memorable local film experiences and uploading the video on the AFA Youtube channel. This Call is open for the length of the campaign from 1st to 28th February 2010. The first ten best uploaded video clips stand a chance to win a free DVD of Singapore Shorts Vol. 2 as well. More details on the Call for Memories can be found on AFA's website.

4. The closing event of the ‘Save Our Film’ campaign will screen the best video clips from the Call for Memories on a roving television travelling down the length of Orchard Road and ending at The Cathay. At the same time, we will take this opportunity to engage the public in conversation with us to share the joys of watching local films.

Event 3 and 4 are the upcomings for the campaign.

For More Information,please go to http://asianfilmarchive.org/5th

Let us save our film,so that they will be enjoyed by the future Generations the way that the film were meant to be seen!

'Newton' by Ho Tzu Nyen, reviewed by Mathias Ortmann

Ho Tzu Nyen is a joker and one of Singapore’s most distinct filmmakers; probably the country’s most intellectually inclined director. At times his playing with media conventions and the inherent self-referentiality of film can be a bit heavy-handed and clogging but there is a well developed sense of humour in there as well. His new short film “Newton” aptly (or shortly) proves the point. It was one among a total of eleven films by Singaporeans to be screened at Rotterdam International Film Festival this year – a nice crop. “Newton” for one isn’t too demanding a piece, neither in terms of duration nor otherwise, a mere stimulus of a film, really. And it doesn’t even require multiple viewing, because it is itself made up of a four time replay of a 1 minute loop.

The idea is as simple as it is intriguing: a visual pun on the concept of the artist as the author of his own inspiration. An albino white male is seen asleep in a medium shot and a clinically neutral setting, sterile, when from high up on a shelf with three nondescript books on it a white bound volume hits him on the head. This timelessly square, Newton-ish “apple” has its very own gravity to reveal – that of the blank page, literally. Reading the book that singled him out, the protagonist (let’s call him our hero) turns white page upon white page, then sets to writing himself. He apparently types nothing (or any such whiteness) into his document, prints it out clean as a bed sheet and fixes the papers to a clipboard. Thus prepared he picks up the bullhorn to shout “Action!” straight into the camera. What this canny director sets into motion is no other plot line than the one that caused this effect in the first place: someone from behind the wall with that bookshelf attached on the opposite side, now pokes out exactly the one item that is destined to fall onto the head of its inventor – our hero.

Please read it whichever way you like, backwards, forwards, or four times in a row – the bottom line is always the same: The artist, even the greatest of his kind, the film director, is but his own happy puppet and favourite fool. Imagination, up to the most phantasmagorical invention, may reveal whatever it will about its source, but divine intervention is not one among them. As “Newton” proves to be the case, this is an empirical observation and easily verifiable. Try, anyone?

Based in Berlin, Mathias Ortmann writes profoundly and intensively about Singapore films. Many of his writings can be found on the Sinema website. This review by Mathias has been written exclusively for SINdie.

Nearly got FOOLED on this!

(My apologies if the photo is not clear...cos it is shot on a 2.0 megapixel phone camera.)

Production Talk - 'In the House of Straw' by Chris Yeo Siew Hua

Over the term break, Zhi Wen decides to move out of his parents’ house to live with two friends. After discovering that Ah Pin and Mark are professional bicycle thieves, Zhi Wen slowly finds himself entrapped in a strange world of vice and deception. A magical personality game they play will finally cause them to switch identities with one another. The film is the tale of the three little pigs set in the modern landscape of urbanized Singapore. Will the three little pigs live happily ever after?

Taken from: http://inthehouseofstraw.com/

*****

Grace: So Siew Hua, tell us. Why "in the house of straw"?
Yeo: The title refers to the popular children fable The Three Little Pigs. Since this film is structured like a fable and is itself a commentary about folklore and myth, the title pays tribute to one of the most well known moral tales of our time. But more importantly, the film is inspired by the adventures of the three little pigs after the demise of the big bad wolf. This is when the fable turns itself around to become the subject of the allegory.



Grace: Is this film set in singapore?
Yeo: The film is set in Singapore, Malaysia and Nepal. The bulk of it was shot in Singapore because, here, houses are blown down and rebuilt everyday, from straw to wood to stone.



Jeremy: How long did you take in all to shoot? I mean I remember it spanned several yrs right?
Yeo: It took me 2 years to complete this film from development to edit, largely due to budget constraints and problems with the schedules. A lot had happened in between. I remember feeling already like a different person while I was editing as compared to when I started developing the script.

Grace: what program did you use to edit?
Yeo: We were editing on Final Cut Pro.



Grace: Is budget the main challenge in producing this film?
Yeo: I think so. There were delays in the production because we ran out of money. Sometime in the later part of the production, I had to stop shoot and work a bit to get the film done. We had little to start off with. Zhi Wen in the film reflects the relationship I have with money.



Jeremy: reading the synopsis, the part about meeting these bizzare bicycle thieves sounds very interesting and mysterious. How did that come about?
Yeo: A bunch of friends had put together their savings to buy me a bicycle for my birthday. At that age, it meant a lot. I was devastated when it got stolen, and then I started imagining who the thieves were and how were they like. I figured there were three of them because it was a perfect number. It’s true that once you begin to understand the people you hate, you cease to hate them, except mine was a case of imaginative invention. After awhile, the story of the three thieves became a private meditation on archetypes and absurdity, mysticism and menstruation.



Jeremy: I understand you are studying philosophy and your course started after you started shooting. Is a lot of the film made in the editing stage?
Yeo: Straw explores in much detail the notion of existence and identity, which was something I was deeply concerned with while developing the script. When I began formal training in the philosophical discipline, it was nearing the end of production. The film does well to capture my state of mind before that, and since then my thoughts on the matter has differed a great deal. Some of the ideas I was exposed to in my studies might have influenced parts of the edit, so in a way, the film suffers from its own schizophrenia. But that is the nature of films, there are different people contributing at every stage of the production. A film then represents the input and conflict of ideas. Sometimes you go back to move forward. In the original script, we had planned for animated sequences, after principle photography, we went back to shoot real live footage which sounded like a crazy idea then. There is something moving yet unpredictable about the process of nurturing the film from script to screen, the word made flesh.





Jeremy: Can you tell us how did you go about achieving a palatable performance from the actors?
Yeo: Performance is not food. Why talk about the palate? It is an interpretative art. One viewer might understand it in a certain way, and another might see it differently. The examination of performance is integral to my construction of the modern fairy tale. This film is after all a tribute to the fables that make up my childhood. Fables present us with characters working with a system of signs. Having been experimenting with semiotics, I have constructed a visual language by which my actors are bound by, wherein lie the somewhat awkward and unconventional methods of portrayal. Characters in this sense become part of the fabric of symbols embedded within a landscape that is both mundane and defamiliarized. Additionally, the play of confusion is also an important element by which a certain tension within the scene can be made sensible. Often, I would explain a scene differently between the actors, most of the time they didn’t know what each other were thinking, because I believe, (like in real life) every individual exists in their own tangent. In reality, no group of people is working towards a single common agenda even if they seem so at first glance. Tension is also the tension of unknowing, and the confusion on the set is transposed on to screen. Performance is purely interpretation, not only on the part of the viewer, but also the actors and myself. What is presented at the end is as authentic as the interpretation, the manipulation, the censorship, and the alienation between viewer, performer and director. Performance is not food.

Grace: Anything else you’re working on?
Yeo: I’m currently developing a biopic about the ancient Chinese thinker Chuang Tze.

Learn more about the film here and updates at 13 Little Pictures

Trying Not to Try Too Hard

‘Don’t try too hard.’

Says jury member and Malaysian filmmaker Liew Seng Tat about the films he has watched at the recent Singapore Short Film Awards. Piqued by his comment, I decided to get in touch with him to ask him what he meant. This is his reply:

‘Personally I feel that a film should be made to feel that it's made effortless. I found some of the films I saw were trying too hard to prove themselves, thus making it very mechanical. Technique remains just technique if it doesn't marry with the story. Story remains superficial if the filmmaker is trying too hard to make a point.’

I remember helping out on a short film recently as a production assistant. The film took 9 days to shoot and the sets and props look like the crew coughed some blood making it. Is it really worth it when the story behind is simply about falling in love or remembering someone? I attended quite a number of screenings at the recent Singapore Short Film Awards. Like Seng Tat mentioned, I felt obliged to nod at how ‘complete’ each work is. What I mean by complete is that each film gets a tick in almost all boxes – properly graded visuals, clean sound, ‘soundtrack’-worthy music and how can we miss the snazzy opening and closing credits? Some even have car chases, period costumes and dashes of CGI! But ‘obliged’ because itching inside me was a feeling that I was only as entertained as watching a TV program. When the credits rolled, I found little to take home with me.

The giant machines and cast of thousands spotted in some local short film productions.

I have some suspicion that the ‘effortless’ storytelling that Seng Tat mentioned does not come naturally to us Singaporeans, unless of course you are a writer or poet. I guess what it means to be ‘effortless’ is like when you do not notice the painter’s strokes when you appreciate the painting. I must admit in writing this article, I am subject of what I am writing about. I have put in ‘effort’. I am conscious of what people will think of this article because many would be reading it and judging my own judgements on the films I write about. I want it to sound clever for fear that I would not be taken seriously. I must make sure I do not say anything too offensive otherwise the MDA will not give me money to further the interests of this blog or my own films.

Similarly among the films I watched, many seem to be too mindful of what a ‘good’ film needs and actually have them all thought out before even thinking of the storyline. For instance, you feel 2 people will fall in love because the script says so. But to be fair to the filmmakers, the films screened were made under a variety of conditions. Some were made as school-based assessed projects. These include La Salle shorts like ‘National Day’, ‘Outing’ or NTU shorts like ‘Respirator’ and ‘My Underwear, My World’. Many were SFC-supported ones usually require a much scripted approach. If we are looking for ‘effortless’ storytelling, perhaps the handful of shorts made under the Fly-By-Night and 48 hr film competition have something to that effect. ’10 Painful things about being a Tranny’ tickled me off my seat with its spontaneous camp. My heart echoed with the honest and poignant feelings evoked in ‘Mummy’. And Siang Yu displays a knack for comedy quite close to Jacen Tan (in his earlier Zo Gang, Zo Peng series) in ‘Is there Money in this?’ Watching these, you can almost imagine the filmmakers sipping up ‘kopi si’ in the neighbourhood coffeeshop while planning the shoot.

Looking beyond our ‘fly-by-nighters’, there is certainly no absence of good films that break the mould. But spontaneous and ‘effortless’, they may not be. Some of my personal favourites include the irreverent ‘Dirty Bitch’, the highly pre-meditated ‘Respirator’ and David Shiyang Liu’s labour of love ‘5 Films in an Anthology of a film in a month’. Look at our more recent crop of feature films like ‘Here’, ‘Invisible Children’, ‘In the House of Straws’ and ‘The Blue Mansion’ in the past year and you might agree with my use of the phrase ‘a heavy-handed approach’. In fact, when I compare them to films from our northern neighbours, I ‘ve got a Yin and Yang way of describing this – Singapore films seek to outsmart their viewers while Malaysian films seek to be outsmarted by their viewers.

'Waiting for Love' by James Lee; 'The Elephant and The Sea' by Woo Ming Jin; 'Flower In The Pocket' by Liew Seng Tat; 'Love Conquers All' by Tan Chui Mui; 'At the End of Daybreak' by Ho Yuhang

Will we ever be like our Malaysian counterparts? Or should we accept the fact that the organic approach does not work for Singapore. There are certainly differences between the two countries that do not warrant an apple-to-apple comparison. Perhaps storytelling comes more naturally to Malaysians because life is tougher up north and recent events in the realm of politics, religion and race can testify to that. I dare say we have become such an ‘institutionalized’ society that we have forgotten how to say simple things in the most natural and human way. Authority and collective voices talk louder here than individuals.

A possible after-effect of the ‘institutionalisation’ is the ‘apeing’ of films of the celebrated by the younger generation of filmmakers. Ben Slater has written about this on Criticine a website for in-depth discourse on Southeast Asian cinema. He mentions a proliferation of short films that ‘pay tribute’ to the ‘Class of 2002’. This class includes Sun Koh, Eva Tang, Royston Tan and others (I would extend the class to include Boo Junfeng as well).

The Class of 2002

I caught a number of these ‘tribute’ or semi-tribute’ films in the SSFA batch. I daringly list them here to my own peril: ‘Letting Go’, ‘Dawn’, ‘National Day’, ‘Linger’, ‘Childhood Games’, ‘Mi’, ‘Man in Snow Globe’, ‘My Underwear, My World’ and ‘Distance’.

While some are giving new window-dressing to old bodies, others are pushing the envelope further abroad. This year, 11 Singapore films made it to the Rotterdam film festival this year, a mecca for the newest and most exciting films worldwide. The festival programmer Gertjan Zuilhof calls us ‘one of the most productive countries of Southeast Asian cinema’. The word is ‘productive’. It does not say whether we have made our mark abroad like Malaysian films have or are still doing. A quick look at the 11 films that will be screening in Rotterdam seems to point to something – we are just not born-storytellers and we more like philosophers or stylists. Considering only the more ‘properly-made’ short films at SSFA and you will find that stylists rule the day (with ‘Girl with the Red Balloons’ taking the cake).

So be it. We can’t tell stories. But we seem to be able to paint fantasies quite well. Victric Thng, another jury member at the SSFA said ‘Take more risks’. Maybe we have found our answer. The key to not trying ‘too hard’ is to take more risks! We are trying too hard because we are just too mindful of keeping up with conventions and expectations. Just let the monster in your film grow and it will still take you home after a helluva ride. And if the huge number of productions this year is anything to go by, this will be a year of exciting rides, other than the new ones at Sentosa.

Here is an interesting quote from Warren Sin, another member of the jury:

‘3 in 4 shorts reveal a certain fetishistic tendency towards the unreal, fantasy … attempts to escape the here and now … a contempt (even) for the present'

Still from Wesley Leon Aroozoo's 'A Lion's Pride', screened at SSFA 2010.