Overview

The 13th Singapore International Film Festival seems to be well organized with so many different focuses and hundreds of films to be screened, to the delight of the festival-goers.

The opening night features Monday (Japan 1999) directed by Sabu who always imbues his films with a touch of comic relief and ends them on a note of anticipation. Monday is a highly entertaining and yet breakthrough film, which unfolds little by little to reveal an increasingly macabre and violent indictment against modern gun culture as well as raises issues that confront everyone living in Japan.

The closing film is Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us (Iran/France 1999) which revolves around the lives of four strangers who arrive from Tehran for a short stay at a village in Iranian Kurdistan. It is an evocative film constructed with its trademark of soulful serenity and refreshingly minimalist approach.

In the Asian Cinema section, Chinese directors such as Liu Bing Jian and Zhang Yang present us some IFF-award-winning films like Men and Women and Shower. There are also plenty of excellent works from Iran, India, Japan and Korea such as M/Other, Kikujiro, Tales of Kish and The Cup.

In the world cinema section, 58 films are divided into British Cinema, Canadian Images, French Panorama and German Focus. There are also lots of international shorts to be screened, most of which are big winners in film festivals, such as Canada's Village of Idiots, Best Animated Film at the Vancouver International Film Festival 1999 and the FIPRESCI Award at the Montreal World Film Festival 1999, and The Old Man And The Sea which has just taken an Oscar.

Breathless (1959), A Woman is a Woman (1961), The Little Soldier (1963), Alphaville(1965), Crazy Pete (1965), The Chinese Girl (1967), Every Man For Himself (1979), First Name Carmen (1984), Germany Nine Zero (1990) and JLG/JLG Self Portrait in December (1994) are films to be screened in homage to the famous French avant-garde director Jean-Luc Goddard.

Another special feature honoring Marlene Dietrich (whose real name is Marie Magdalene Dietrich) is also well-prepared. This Berlin-born actress known for her "bedroom eyes" launched herself into international prominence and attained international notoriety on the strength of her performance as the heartless temptress Lola in the Blue Angel (1930), and also known as the ultimate Hollywood woman of mystery - a symbol of erotic allure for several generations of moviegoers. A Tribute to Marlene Dietrich is made possible by the Goethe Institut and her main works are to be screened.

As an avant-garde auteur who earned surprising access to the mainstream, Peter Greenaway is among the most ambitious and controversial filmmakers of his era. Five shorts released between 1976 and 1983 are to present his training as a painter and his preoccupation with theories of structural linguistics, ethnography and philosophy.

The section of Sex in Asian Cinema maybe the most sensitive in this festival. At first 14 films were to be screened, but Lies by the Korean director Jang Sun-Woo was banned a month before the festival and then In The Realm Of The Senses by Japanese director Nagisa Oshima withdrew because of censor restrictions. Lies was rejected by the Korean ratings board and literally banned from domestic screenings because of its depiction of a sado-masochistic relationship between a high school girl and a middle-aged sculptor, while the award-winning In The Realm Of The Senses is an unrelenting journey into the world of passion and eroticism.

Fourteen films such as Seventeen Years and 6IXTYNIN9 are to be screened in the Silver Screen Awards section, while there is a tribute to the successful Theo Angelopoulos who is known as one of the premiere contemporary directors in his native Greece and worldwide, notably Eternity and a Day which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 98. Last but not least, the sections of Midnight Madness, Focus On Vietnam and Youth In Film are surely to be popular for their well-selected focus.

Wrap-up

The 16-day festival not only screened hundreds of films in the different programs, but also held informative events analyzing the film industry in the past, at the moment and in the future.

The SIFF was also proud to host this year's NETPAC's (Network For The Promotion of Asian Cinema) General Assembly, which aims to inform and promote Asian independent cinema. They discussed how sex is portrayed in their respective countries in Southeast Asian Cinema and in East Asian Cinema.

The SIFF and Singapore Film Commission jointly organised a seminar conducted by award-winning Chinese director Zhang Yuan, whose films Crazy English and Seventeen Years were showcased at the festival. Featuring clips from his past films, he enlightened festival-goers as to his trademark style of filmmaking mixing fiction with documentary, the low budgets he has had to struggle with, problems working with non-actors, and how he improvised the script.

39 photos of the sex symbol--Marlene Dietrich, were on display at the Goethe Institut Gallery.

Singapore Film History-The First Wave (1900s - 1970s) was an exhibition co-organized by the National Archives of Singapore and the SIFF showing the start of cinema at the turn of the century when film was first introduced as a form of mass entertainment in Singapore, to when local filmmaking activities came to a virtual standstill in 1979.

Short and Sweet was a collection of German shorts that intended to entertain audiences in an intelligent way. Packaged under four thematic groups - animation (Tricky Germany), comedies (Irony of Fate), romance (Love and Other Cruelties) and politics (Politics? Politics!), the shorts were introduced by Thomas Meyer-Hermann, a graphics art grad at the Stuttgart Art Academy.

Directors in attendance at the festival screenings: Sabu for Monday, Valeri Ogorodnikov for The Barracks, Pen-ek Ratanaruang for 6ixtynin9, Reginald Harkema for A Girl is a Girl, Mojtaba Raei for Birth of a Butterfly, Park Chong won for Rainbow Trout, Dev Benegal for Split Wide Open, Viet Linh for Collective Flat, Hana Makhmalbaf for The Day The Aunt Was Ill, Zhang Yuan for Crazy English and Seventeen Years, Somaratne Dissanayaka for Saroja, Catherine Annau for Just Watch Me: Trudeau And The 70s Generation. Some films, such as Understanding Jane, The Cup, Sharkskin Man & Peach Hip Girl, the Oscar-winning Topsy Turvy, Godard's master piece Breathless, seemed to be big hits as they joined the list of sold out films at the early screenings.

Silver Screen Awards

Best Film: Darkness And Light (Taiwan) Dir: Chang Tso-chi

SFC Young Cinema Award: Eating Air (Singapore) Dir: Jasmine Ng & Kelvin Tong

Special Jury Prize: Split Wide Open (India) Dir: Dev Benegal

Best Director: Zhang Yuan (Seventeen Years)

Best Actor: Rahul Bose (Split Wide Open)

Best Actress: Liu Lin and Li Bing Bing (Seventeen Years)

Best Screenplay: Kadosh by Aos Gitai & Eliette Abecassis

Short Film Awards

Best Film: Sons Dir: Royston Tan Tsze Kiam

Special Jury Prize: Wait Dir: Kwong Chee Guan Boi

Special Achievement Award: Sons

NETPAC-FIPRESCI Awards

Darkness and Light (Taiwan) Dir: Chang Tso-chi

So Close To Paradise (China) Dir: Wang Xiao-shuai

FilmFestivals.com Asian Correspondant
Fanfan KO