2SSFA - 'The Fish and The Ring' by Ervinna Cahyadi

Premiering at the Vancouver Singapore Film Festival last year is The Fish and the Right, the debut film by Indonesian Ervinna Cahyadi, a Digital Animation graduate from NTU. With the swath of 3D animated films ruling the big screens recently, this 2D feature is a welcome breath of fresh air that is both traditional and effective in conveying the unpretentious story.

An old man sits by the jetty reminiscing when a fish devours his ring, believing it is supper. Concurrently an old lady, marooned in a shipwreck, is reflecting about her life. The marine creature thus acts as the matchmaker between the two forlorn long-lost lovebirds, who obviously believed they’d never see each other again.

Fate plays funny games on people, and this is espoused in this silent piece that definitely has the capability to go places.

This film was nominated for Best Animation at the recent 2nd Singapore Short Film Awards.

2SSFA - 'Flux' by Nigel Heng

An international finalist in the Jumping Frames Film Festival held in Hong Kong last year. Flux is an experimental short film that questions the role of a housewife, content with simply taking care of household chores everyday and perhaps nothing much else. She dances through her daily routine, finding excitement in run-of-the-mill roles like cooking, and cleaning. Or does she?

The irony of losing oneself in the process is emphasized in Nigel Heng’s work, a collaboration with local dance choreographer Elysa Wendi of the Arts Fission Company. The protagonist seems happy. She starts dancing in her home, unknowingly under the watchful gaze of the intrusive voyeuristic audience. Her dance steps are sleek, bordering on the visceral yet harbouring a geisha-esque feel of restriction. And she sheds her hair and skin along the way, a symbolism of losing one’s outer personality until there is barely an empty core left.
This film was nominated at the 2nd Singapore Short Film Awards for Best Editing, Best Cinematography and Best Experimental film.

2SSFA - 'Wake' by Atsuko Hirayanagi

Wake delves into the afterlife, a provoking story of desolate loneliness and misery. How would you feel if you were bereft of any loved ones by your side when you breathe your last breath? That, the takeaway from a tale that revolves around a 15-year-old corpse and an unfulfilled wish.

The protagonist, Mike, is a demolition site inspector that paradoxically hoards onto his past despite destroying for the future. His ineptitude to let go of his past and his unwillingness to move on with the future, and the subsequent regret, denial and self-pity that inevitably takes over form the core of the short film. The mature offering (pun unintended) more than deserves its slew of nominations, and its Best Art Direction win.

The morose tale was part of Atsuko’s repertoire at the prestigious New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Asia—and inspired from a 2004 Japanese news article about a 20-year-old skeleton found in an abandoned apartment on the verge of demolition. Why had nobody bothered to look him up?

Or perhaps life is really as heartless as it goes, ebbing and flowing. And the past, easily forgotten no matter how hard one struggles to hold on.

This film was nominated at the 2nd Singapore Short Film Awards for Best Director, Best Fiction, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Performance and won for Best Art Direction.

2SSFA - 'Mickey' by Wesley Leon Aroozoo

Wesley Leon Aroozoo’s artistic direction and film conceptualization harbor a certain je ne sais quoi. On one hand it is really tempting to simply dismiss his filmography as bizarre; yet on the other there is certainly more than meets the eye than sheer absurdity.

The opening scene is impressionistic of Moon (2009), a British science fiction drama directed by Duncan Jones. The film, cleverly titled in a double entendre that pays homage to a popular Disney mouse, makes obvious mickey out of the human obsession with scientific experimentation and its will toward progress. In a running commentary that sometimes lapses into Hindi, multifold otherwise innocuous comparisons between rats and human beings are made that is destined to confuse more than clear the air.

“I see everything yet nothing,” Aroozoo cleverly mocks the baffled audience in one of the lines in his film. And with that, he hits home strongly the fallacy that scientists, and gradually human beings, tend to think they see the big picture despite being myopic most of the times. Like three blind mice.

This film was nominated for Best Art Direction (Wesley Leon Aroozoo, Michelle Cheong) and Best Experimental at the 2ns Singapore Short Film Awards.

2SSFA - 'Scot Free' by Chia Peizhen

Scot Free has travelled widely, screening to Film Festival audiences in Singapore, Vancouver and Bangkok. This 16-minute French short garnered a triple nomination at the Singapore Short Film Awards, an easily well-deserved feat given its tight-pacing and novel means of telling a relatively clichéd story. The director’s bio explains all—Chia, who recently graduated from Ngee Ann Polytechnic, majored in directing and has a penchant of featuring female empowerment in her films.


Two female French tourists find themselves utterly bored in the stoic urban jungle that is Singapore. Well, what would they expect—romanticism à la Paris all over the world? They complain endlessly about the heat and humidity, whine about the lack of cultural elements and the need to report to their relatives back home with lies of what they have been up to, and cringe their noses at Indian food.

Yet one night an uninvited guest suddenly appears at their hotel room door—a drunkard who stereotypically has to be a German to add to the European mix. Violence ensues, and they somehow murder him. But what matters more, however, is the secondary plot that lies beneath this façade, a subdued lesbian story that is told through exchanged words, gazes, and actions.

“Simple things can be hard to explain at times,” muses one of the protagonists. How true.

This film was nominated for Best Director, Best Fiction and Best Script at the 2nd Singapore Short Film Awards.

2SSFA - 'Too Far North' by Koo Chia Meng

“For the people and the places that took us away and brought home with us.”

So reads the one-liner synopsis for Koo Chia Meng’s Too Far North, a 5-minute non-fiction film that intersperses Singaporean voiceovers with still shots of the Taipei city landscape, and the occasional time-lapse. The cinematography is exquisite, as Koo exhibits a sensitivity to framing in his maximization of the use of lines in several stunning frames, one of which an aerial shot of a busy Taipei crossroad that was especially impressionistic to this reviewer.

The film’s message is clear and strong without any of the overbearing Total Defence “love your country” overtones that our government bodies seem to be fond of in their collaterals and avdertisements. All in all, this short film was certainly effective in evoking the silver of pride the average cynical Singaporean layperson might have buried deep in the recesses of his heart.

“Only you would know where home is”. Well said.

This film was nomniated for Best Documentary in the 2nd Singapore Short Film Awards.

2SSFA - 'The Forest Spirits' by Ting Szu Kiong

I attended the first nominee sscreening of the 2nd Singapore Short Film Awards expecting films that were of top-notch quality, to say the least. Thus I was actually befuddled over the inclusion of The Forest Spirits, until I found out what the film was nominated for later on.

To say the least, this was definitely the weakest showing of the six films screened for the programme. For it is downright slapstick and tacky. Granted that B-grade films is a respectable genre all on their own—and I would say the best B-grade film would be one that is the most slapstick, the most tacky, the most lame—but this film simply jars from the lineup of what are otherwise pretty outstanding shorts.

Of course there is a need for a crowdpleaser, but this hardly sat in with the Substation crowd.

The Forest Spirits is lame, unfunny, and tries too hard to entertain yet end up leaving audiences confounded over how they spent their last eight minutes of their lives. “What on earth was that?” I thought to myself. Maybe the forest spirits could help me answer that.

Yet my review notes did include one line that was the perfect answer to my initial doubts over the inclusion of this screening: “(The) music is really polished.” Unfortunately, it falls short of winning an award—in fact all the short films nominated for the category fell short—because the judges were looking for sound design that is “more than just putting music into a film” and that “involves a sound scape”. It does make sense—for all the polished technicalities of the music, it only serves to accentuate the scenes onscreen without serving to create a visceral image in the minds of the audience.

This films was nminated for Best Sound (Studio.MB) at the 2nd Singapore Short Film Awards.

2SSFA - 'The Beat of the City that Freezed' by Joo Choon Lin

The amount of dedication that goes into any stop-motion animation piece is a surefire testament to the passion to the art. This eight-minute piece is clearly a budding sign to Singapore’s fledgling future in the animation scene, one that is unwise to remain insouciant to. With local input in films like Rango (2011), there is definitely room for upcoming filmmakers like Joo Choon Lin, whose verve shines in The Beat of the City that Freezed (2010). The tour de force, a stop-motion silent, harbors an effortless integration of sound effects making it a worthy nominee in both the Best Animation and Best Sound categories.

At first glance, the short is seemingly sheer jabberwocky. Yet it is anything but, the short film an experimental environmental piece that jars. The pulchritude of Choon Lin’s takes lies in cognitive dissonance with the cesspool as inflicted in the film. The preamble harks back to Darwinian theory, a pursuit of the single oddball misfit—the red ball, a persona non grata forced into eventual evolution, a metamorphorsis that clearly espouses the “survival of the fittest”. It then becomes the heart of a bigger creature in a stark empty room that soon is filled with debris. A wall disintegrates, and external elements diffuse within, the outside world portrayed through “live” traffic footage as a metaphor to technological advancement and its inevitable pollution. The conveyor belt of waste, a clever innuendo of the cyclical nature of garbage, and how it is neverending unless someone puts a stop to it. The world freezes over, a second Ice Age burgeons, and the environmental message possibly timely given the scrutiny of environmental messages and with contrived events like Earth Hour around the corner. Sorry for the cynicism, but I don’t see how such forced campaigns will do anything to alter long-term mindsets.

To take things a step further in what continues to flummox me, Choon Lin misspells the past tense of ‘freeze’ as ‘freezed’ as opposed to ‘froze’. The reason, perhaps, is an open mystery.

This film was nominated for Best Animation and Best Sound and the 2nd Singapore Short Film Awards

2SSFA - 'Epiphany' Han Xuemei

The premise of this short film—a final-year project for NTU’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information—seems a tad overdone. From the breakout award-winning Crash (2004) to Babel (2006), the butterfly effect has been a recurring theme in films attempting to capture a tangible link to what starts out as seemingly disparate events—and possibly discombobulate audiences.

Yes, we get it. What goes around comes around, karma is a bitch. And the synopsis, all of one sentence, easily augurs a sense of foreboding. Quoted verbatim, it reads as such: “On a particular morning, three vulnerable individuals unknowingly cross paths and play a part in changing one another’s destinies”.

That said, Epiphany provides a hackneyed Asian angle to this theme. We have the forlorn suicidal daughter, all decked in bright red and threatening to haunt as a vengeful spirit; her grandmother, fraught with worry at the sudden disappearance of the daughter leading to near tragedies; the hooligan boyfriend, the distracted speeding driver, et al. The short purveys these stereotypes, along with the notion of an interconnectability of fate that would perhaps lead some to ponder over the very existence of life, watch out for signs of fate, and question the law of averages.

While characterization is strong, the short 23 minutes was unfortunately insufficient to make me commiserate with the characters. After all, everything that happens is seemingly out of their hands. Life is unfair, they get the short end of the stick. Er, too bad for them? It’s not as if there was any clear attempt to get out of their rut.

Yet the mature editing warrants a nomination—strong pacing ensures that the audience is kept at bay throughout the numerous twists and turns—right up to the final scene of the suicidal daughter’s creepy smile at the camera. The gaze, a pivotal cinematic component, is well-executed. We see the stark fear, despair, anxiety, realization, and a myriad of emotions through the window of the soul. And they beguilingly connect, both with the other onscreen characters and with the audience.

This film was nominated for Best Editing at the 2nd Singapore Short Film Awards.

2SSFA - 'Dinner' by Kaz Cai

'Dinner' by Kaz Cai is a supernatural romance by a filmmaker who has produced, directed and/or edited documentaries and live concerts over the past decade, and whom also has a number of television commercial Apollo Awards to her name. With multifarious accolades, it comes as no surprise that this short packed the most punch. It’s the best written, it grips you right from the start and doesn’t let you go till the end. It has interesting characters—you’ll never go wrong with ex-convicts-turn-good who wishes to forge friendships with just about any old lady you meet in the middle of the night along a creepy street. The best ambience, it’s vintage lighting as a renaissance of the 1924 era, and the cricket sounds accentuating the spooky deserted streets in the middle of the night. With minimal dialogue, this is easily the best showcase of the adage “Show, don’t tell”, especially when you can easily infer what is going on onscreen. Kaz shows impeccable eye for detail, her mise-en-scène stunning. The still chair against a passing bicycle, the smiling old lady sitting on a bench centralized within the frame, which tracks out to show her sitting directly beneath the lighted cross of a church. Which in itself is really creepy, the fact that everything occurs on Chinese Valentine’s Day, which falls on the seventh day of the Hungry Ghost Month, in itself a clear harbinger that things may be anything but normal—to the audience, but sadly not to our protagonist.

2SSFA - 'Yours Truly' by Kevin Chan

The hopeless romantic in me really enjoyed (and even teared at) 'Yours Truly' by Kevin Chan. Yes, the plot has obvious Korean drama inspirations—just look at the promotional film still—but what Kevin has done was remarkable. He condensed what would otherwise be a 2-hour melodrama into a 12-minute short, whilst managing to take the audience on a whirlwind emotional roller-coaster of Rachel and Chris’ relationship. We earnestly want the picture-perfect couple together in a happily-ever-after ending. But alas, the twist can be seen coming from miles away and the audience knows disaster is bound to strike. Too many bombs are littered throughout the film—the cornea transplant, photography, the need for a deceased to be the cornea bearer—such that the bombshell at the end is, in all its literal scene of the word, is just a shell without the explosives. Yet it works, because that’s how Korean melodramas are typically like. Which makes me also think that the film would perhaps be more palatable if it was shot in Korean. Though perhaps casting might have been tough given how it was Kevin’s graduation thesis in his Master in Film & Television at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) in Melbourne. But Kevin demonstrates acuity in his direction, with strong angles, beautiful cinematic photography and a lingering storyline that’s impactful and touching despite the foreseeable twist.

2SSFA - 'A New Hope' by Chermaine Ong

'A New Hope' is a social documentary chronicling the life and hardship of 30-year-old Pong, a HIV-stricken Thai woman. Also central to the film are her close relations, namely her infected 6-year-old daughter and her boyfriend, a handicapped Casanova who ironically philanders around but yet has been given the clean bill. In Thailand, HIV was the norm more than a decade ago but has been slowly eradicated from the public eye as effective public affairs campaigns managed to stem the spread. The decline in the disease coincides with a rise in social stigma against it, Pong tells her tale in this biography. Chermaine, a Communications Studies graduate in her final-year project, stayed true to her subjects through the use of first-person commentaries that convey the trauma of being a HIV carrier in present-day Thailand. The audience is taken through a journey of shock, denial and eventual acceptance as Pong relates how she dealt with social clichés, her downward spiral into near-suicide as she slit her throat, overdosed on sleeping pills, before being resigned to fate. Most of this documentary was shot in Pong’s native Thai language and it is impressive how Chermaine managed to source for her contacts and conduct the interviews especially given the (plausible) language barrier. The film does away with fanciful editing and all that schnazz, opting instead to remain faithful to the core storyline surrounding Pong. And true to the optimistic title, A New Hope had an equally upbeat conclusion.

2SSFA - 'Labour Day' by He Shuming

'Labour Day' provides a National Education-esque commentary of Singapore’s social landscape, thrusts a limelight on the foreign minorities residing here, and attempts to create awareness and empathy towards them. The film is aesthetically and stylistically mature and it shows that the Putnam School of Film’s LaSalle College of the Arts First Class Honors graduate is clearly at ease behind the camera, and his film knowledge is alluded through his clear attention to detail. He varies his cinematic angles, plays with depth of field, utilizes apt music compositions, dabbles in appropriate color schemes of mutes with bright overtones, and expresses sensitivity to framing and lines in a shot (the misè-en-scene of the toilet scene was impressive). Right down to the typography of his opener and his subtitles – which, by the way, gets me started on how irksome the standards of subtitles are in most of the short films I watched.

While Labour Day was the easiest to sit through for the evening, it falls prey to tackiness in the end when metaphorical chimera takes over in the style of the 1980s music video that simply espouses the myth in the plus-sized lady’s head. But my bad if that’s an innuendo to the golden adage “it ain’t over till the fat lady sings”. Unfortunately, too, character arcs are lightweight and one-dimensional – and it being a short film is no excuse for fleshing them out at least adequately. The film easily perpetrates the stereotypes that local minorities fall prey to, under the veil of job opportunities in this concrete jungle.

2SSFA - 'Lunch' by Anocha Suwichakornpong

'Lunch' by award-winning director, Anocha Suwichakornpong a Thai film (strange how this appears in the Singapore Short film selection!) where nothing much really happens. And you thought though the plethora of Thai horror films or the recent romance Hello Stranger that the Thais are a dramatic bunch. It may surprise you to know that film scholars actually do study of films where nothing happens, which Margulies defines in his 1996 book “Nothing Happens” as “the everyday [that] is often appended to films and literature in which the representation’s substratum of content seems at variance with the duration accorded it. Too much celluloid, too many words, too much time, is devoted to “nothing of interest.” We have the two protagonists – the (virginal) schoolboy and the (horny) schoolgirl. They play truant, dine-and-dash, exchange dirty banter on a vast field, talk about their future, hug trees, caress tree bark, dissect the science behind rock-paper-scissors, and also toy with the idea of marriage at what must be the most mindbaffling moment of the evening of shorts in Programme A.

2SSFA - 'Maybe She Loves Everyone' by Wesley Leon Aroozoo

There is something for French zealots in Maybe She Loves Everyone by Wesley Leon Aroozoo. Yes, even the title is trés romantique. This meta-romance expressionism-noir piece is confuddling, to say the least. The French 101 CD manages to intone translations of lines like “Maybe you’re not who I think you are”, “I would not have done the same to you”, “But you should feel sad because a smile is all I have left for you” throughout the show. They act as voiceovers for the protagonists, who have to go through weird scenes that the audience is to make head and toes of. Then there’s the sudden fireman suit, the lawn-mower, the abduction. Fans of Wesley's shorts will not be alarmed.