SINGAPORE: With local filmmaker Kirsten Tan flying the Singapore flag high as her debut feature POP AYE gets its world premiere and competes at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival later this week (Jan 19-29), 2017 is shaping up to be an encouraging year for filmmakers across the region.
In Singapore alone, this year will see several feature film debuts by new directors supported by IMDA’s New Talent Feature Grant as well as Tan Pin Pin’s documentary In Time To Come and Abbas Akbhar’s Singapore-India co-production Chennai2Singapore.
The success of the recently concluded 27th Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF) is also testament to a growing acceptance of the relevance of Southeast Asian film making and the acknowledgement that there is a new generation of directors emerging from the region.
Yuni Hadi, Executive Director of the SGIFF, told Channel NewsAsia that focusing on new Southeast Asian films was an essential part of the festival, which puts a high level of emphasis on its Southeast Asian and Singapore short film competition.
“It is where we are discovering emerging talent and can highlight these names to the world,” she said. “For example, our Southeast Asian film lab offers a real sense of connection to the Southeast Asian community with our mentors and lab head from Asia.”
Recent years have seen the building of a steady momentum in Southeast Asia’s diverse film communities, which are asserting their voices on the international festival platform. With the likes of Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Philippines’ Brilliante Mendoza and Singapore’s Anthony Chen garnering acclaim at various top festivals such as Cannes and Venice, some industry insiders are betting that Southeast Asia could be the next movie-making hot-spot.
“When we talk about Southeast Asia, we often hear about the potential business markets, news on the political situations, and the wonderful resorts that make it a great tourist destination. With the moving image being such a powerful medium today, what filmmakers try to do is explore who we are as people, what we are doing as society and where we are heading,” said Yuni.
With this momentum building in regional cinema, who are the filmmakers to keep an eye on?
KIRSTEN TAN (SINGAPORE)
Kirsten Tan (Photo: www.kirstentan.com)
It is rare enough to hear of a Singaporean filmmaker winning awards and recognition internationally. It is even rarer to be a female making those waves.
Born and raised in Singapore but now based in New York, Kirsten Tan is one of the major regional talents set to make a global impact.
The 2015 Young Artist Award winner has won accolades with her short films, nabbing Best South-east Asian Short Film at the 25th SGIFF’s Silver Screen Awards in 2014 and being named Best Director at the same festival in 2007 for Fonzi. Her short 10 Minutes Later won various awards at other international festivals, including the International Women’s Film Festival in the Philippines, BRNO Sixteen in Czech Republic and the Student Film Festival in the Greater China Region.
Aside from making history as the first Singaporean feature to compete in the Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition, Tan’s debut feature POP AYE has already been feted internationally. It was selected for the 2015 Cannes Film Festival’s 11th Cinefondation’s L’Atelier, invited to participate in a project lab at the 2014 Berlinale Talent’s Script Station and also took home the top prize of US$75,000 (S$101,700) at the TorinoFilmLab in 2014.
In 2015, Tan was showcased in the CNN programme Ones To Watch, where a recognised master of a particular craft identifies upcoming talent. Cannes Camera d’Or and multiple Golden Horse Award winner Anthony Chen chose Tan as the film industry’s next rising star.
“I think she has a very unique eye, great visuals and I like her sensibility and tone,” he said in a previous interview. “I think that’s something quite rare from our part of the world, that black humour ... I think that if she can keep on and maintain that sensibility, that unique quality, in her feature film, she will go very, very far.”
K RAJAGOPAL (SINGAPORE)
K Rajagopal (Photo: SGIFF)
His first feature film A Yellow Bird made its world premiere and competed at the 55th edition of La Semaine de la Critique (International Critics' Week) at the 2016 Cannes International Film Festival. It had a sold out screening at the SGIFF and a successful theatrical run in Singapore's Golden Village Cinemas.
A true labour of love, the award-winning short filmmaker took three years and 10 script drafts to finally deliver A Yellow Bird, which tells the story of an ex-convict who tries to re-connect with his family after his release from prison. It stars Bollywood star Seema Biswas and Singaporean actors Sivakumar Palakrishnan, Udaya Soundari and Nithiyia Rao.
“This is something I’ve been looking forward to for the longest time and I needed to make sure that this was the story I wanted to tell,” he told Channel NewsAsia in an interview.
“Being my first feature, it felt like it could be my only chance to do it and so I wanted to do it right.
K Rajagopal previously won the SGIFF’s Special Jury Prize three years in a row, with I Can’t Sleep Tonight (1995), The Glare (1996) and Absence (1997). He has also won other awards and accolades for his other short films, including Timeless, The New World and Brother, and is also known for his contributions to the film anthologies 7 Letters and Lucky 7.
ANOCHA SUWICHAKORNPONG (THAILAND)
Anocha Suwichakornpong (Photo: NTU Centre For Contemporary Art Singapore)
It’s only her sophomore film, but Anocha Suwichakornpong is firmly on the radar as a director to watch, thanks to By The Time It Gets Dark, which centres around the 1976 massacre carried out by police on protestors at a Bangkok university. Widely praised by critics for challenging the construction of history and innovating the form by finding new ways to push beyond limitations, the film was in competition at the 69th Locarno Film Festival and is supported by the Thailand's Ministry of Culture, Doha Film Institute, and the Hubert Bals Fund.
Suwichakornpong has been racking up credits for a while, with a resume that boasts graduating from the film programme at Columbia University, being a recipient of a Hollywood Foreign Press Association Fellowship and having her short film (The Passenger) exhibit at London’s Tate Modern in 2012.
Her debut feature Mundane History, which received the Hubert Bals Fund from the International Film Festival Rotterdam, has won a string of awards including The Tiger Award in Rotterdam and Best Director in Mumbai.
By leaving her audience questioning whether the story before them is real life of not, critics like Indiewire’s Kelley Dong find Suwichakornpong's film “a simultaneous critique, celebration, and examination of the blurring line between cinema and reality”. Her attempt to say something new in the well-trodden film-within-a-film genre is an indication of her talent.
BRADLEY LIEW (MALAYSIA)
Bradley Liew and Pepe Smith (Photo: SGIFF)
Malaysian-born and Manila-based Liew is what many would call a behind-the-scenes triple threat, working as a director, cinematographer and producer in both the Philippines and Malaysia.
In 2012, he was accepted into the Asian Film Academy of the Busan International Film Festival where he won the Lumos Award for Outstanding Performance from celebrated Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke. He is also an alumnus of the NAFF Fantastic Film School, Berlinale Talents, Locarno Filmmakers Academy and EAVE.
But it is his first feature film which is making Liew one of the more talked about young filmmakers in the region.
Liew found inspiration for his debut feature while shooting a behind-the-scenes video for another film - Pepe Diokno’s Above The Clouds. That film’s star - Filipino rock legend Pepe Smith - became Liew’s own leading man for Singing In Graveyards after the young filmmaker’s pitch.
The film, which sees real life rocker Smith act as his own impersonator in a postmodern mirroring of imagination and reality, took three years to write and premiered at the 31st Venice International Film Critics’ Week. On top of competing in various festivals across the world, Singing In Graveyards was the winner of the Most Promising Project Award at SGIFF’s 2014 Southeast Asian Film Lab and nabbed best film at the recent Kolkata International Film Festival,
Critics like Hollywood Reporter say that the film “provides a visually poised and emotionally searing character study of a man's engagement with a lost past and a harsher present.”
Next in Liew’s pipeline is the development of his second feature film script, Motel Acacia, which is part of the 2017 Sam Spiegel International Film Lab and also received support through the 2016 EAVE Ties That Bind and the 2015 NAFF IT Project of the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival.
LIAO JIEKAI (SINGAPORE)
Liao Jiekai (www.liaojiekai.com)
Having made waves in the visual arts circles since he was just 17-years-old, (a video installation titled Remembering A Timeless Self exhibited at Arts Connects at the Singapore Art Musuem in 2001), it was only a matter of time before Liao moved into genre filmmaking.
Liao might not be the most recognisable name at this point, but given his most recent Best Southeast Asian Short Film Director win for his film The Mist at SGIFF’s Silver Screen Awards, it looks likely he’ll be a much more familiar filmmaking face in the near future.
Featuring two women who recollect the sounds and images from places in their collective memories in this evocative dance-inspired film, the award jury felt that Liao “successfully translates collective memory in a poetic way” through sound and image, “without falling into experimental film pretension”.
Trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) under the Presidential Merit Scholarship, the Singaporean filmmaker and visual artist graduated in 2008 with a Bachelors of Fine Arts and worked on successful shorts such as Clouds in a Shell, The Inner City and Before The Wedlock House before moving into feature-length territory with Red Dragonflies. That first feature film won the prestigious Special Jury Prize at the Jeonju International Festival.
The 2012 Young Artist Award winner has long been active in the Singapore filmmaking community where he's done duties as producer, editor and cinematographer. He is also the co-founder of 13 Little Pictures, an independent film collective based locally which produces and promotes films that celebrate diverse cinema and unique directorial visions.