SGIFF is here! One of the weird silver linings about being in Singapore is being able to experience various festivals and events – film, music, arts, general ‘culture’ – that younger me had no interest, then no time, to attend. Like various hybrid festivals this one’s a combination of limited-attendance live events and a much longer list of online events.
I’ve been fortunate enough to be selected for its Youth Jury, which has brought me in contact with other fantastic, lively and fun people and given me the opportunity to take a look at their work too. So far I’ve only watched the Shorts Programme and some of the Monographs film essays, but those have already given me plenty to think about. One of them is my understanding of urbanism, space and environment (I discuss this briefly in my review of Petersen Vargas’ How to Die Young in Manila). Another is a novel, immersive form of documentary exemplified Riar Rizaldi’s two submissions, Tellurian Drama and a video essay on Indonesian horror – something weaving together various media forms, blurring the line between societal, symbolic unconscious, memory and different mediums of representation.
Something more interesting is the nature of film review and critique itself. A session with John Lui, the Straits Times’ resident critic, was an eye-opening experience that was a little disheartening in his cynical acceptance of his role as a consumerist arbiter of movies. I don’t mean to imply he’s not doing his job, nor that a paper like the Straits Times ought to search out avant-garde pieces to comment on, but to point out how his defense of the quite banal, pared-down reviews are an artefact of Singapore’s cultural economy. In John’s words, he has to write what ‘the Ah Muis and Ah Luis’ will understand and see, especially when writing for a “woke” crowd (I can’t reproduce the snark through mere words here) will get shot down by his editors anyway. On one hand the film community already has various avenues to explore its film interests, whether through Singapore Film Society’s meetups and events, ad-hoc Projector events, smaller festivals, blogs etc; the tepid scope of the Straits Times’ review section might end up reproducing its own audience in how only the ‘Ah Muis’ and ‘Ah Luis’ end up reading the section. The quite unwarranted subtext that ‘Ah Muis’ and ‘Ah Luis’ have to be coddled, saving any form of political, moral and social complexity for some millenial literati, notwithstanding, it’s not like in-depth, socially engaged reviews in Singapore don’t survive. Hear65 (for music) and ArtsEquator are fantastic, promising examples.
Returning to SGIFF, I’ll be gathering with some friends next Saturday to watch that day’s SGIFF programme – Yellow Cat (Zheltaya Khoska, 2020), Citizen Hustler (Tan Biyun, 2020), Veins of the World (Byambasuren Davaa, 2020), and maybe a few fun shorts. All this in a makeshift home cinema, somewhere in Yishun, swapping masks and mixed popcorn for Bundeberg soft drinks and whatever catches our fancy at the local provision shop. I’m looking forward to it.
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