15 (2003)

WHO: Royston Tan wrote & directed this, his first feature film.

WHAT: Well known to Singapore moviegoers but practically unknown elsewhere is the fact that the city-state has one of the most restrictive motion picture rating systems around. As one of the producers of 15, Eric Khoo, puts it in an interview with Tilman-Baumgärtel (published in his book Southeast Asian Independent Cinema):

I only wish they would bring down the age for R-rated pictures. I don't think anywhere else in the world, you have to be twenty-one to see a film. You can have sex when you are sixteen, but you cannot watch Borat!

Under such conditions, it should be unsurprising that 15 had to endure a record 27 cuts by Singapore censors before it could be released theatrically in the country it was made, And even then, only those over 21 were allowed to watch it. Combined with a ban on local home video release, it meant that teenagers of the age depicted in the film (the title derives from the age of the adolescents we see on the screen- most of them non-actors recruited from real youth gangs) would have to wait six years to be old enough to legally view the film. 

It's perhaps even less surprising that filmmakers like Tan and Khoo (whose first feature as a director was the punk-rock-inflected Mee Pok Man) would begin their feature filmmaking careers with films that pushed censorship boundaries- the most passionate independent artists are often inclined to press against whatever boundary they feel constraining them, and if, as in Singapore, that boundary is the censor's razor they gravitate to material that gives it resistance. 15 features drugs, violence, and full-frontal male nudity, among other screen taboos. No wonder it became one of the most notorious - and internationally popular - films ever produced on the island nation.

WHERE/WHEN: A CAAMFest presentation at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, tonight only at 7:00.

WHY: CAAMFest is one of the Bay Area's great examples of a film festival loyal to the filmmakers it helps local audiences discover, and to the audiences who appreciate discovering them. Royston Tan's relationship with the festival is a great example. Though the festival hasn't shown every one of his films made over the years, in 2002 (back when it was called the SF International Asian American Film Festival) it screened his short Sons (which is now viewable legally and for free via Youtube), followed up by programming a 35-minute version of 15 the following year. By this time the feature version was in the pipeline and it was screened at the 2004 SFIAAFF; that's where I saw it. I barely remember it so it's clearly time to view it again and the CAAM programmers know it, bringing Tan himself to discuss it and the rest of his career tonight in conversation with Valerie Soe. It's the culmination of a mini-retrospective of Tan's work that also included a festival reprise of his biggest hometown commercial success 881 and the U.S. premiere of his latest film Old Romances. It's great to have the festival bring back its tradition of hosting career surveys of Asian auteurs after a couple-year hiatus.

15 is not the only case of CAAMFest/SFIAAFF screening a short film and later an feature-length remake or sequel version. I'm sure there have been many over the festival history but what comes to mind right now is the 2002 screening of SF Art Institute graduate Michael Shaowanasai's To Be...Or Not To Be?: The Adventures of Iron Pussy III, which foretold a 2004 showing of Shaowanasai's The Adventure of Iron Pussy, co-directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I suppose I think of this example because the short video work that preceded Apichatpong's Mekong Hotel at CAAMFest screenings this past weekend, Jennifer Phang's Advantageous, is getting expanded into a feature-length film later this year. It's good news, because although the short is thought-provoking and emotionally powerful on its own, its science-fiction concept feels at times constrained by its 25-minute frame and deserves a larger canvas. Perhaps we'll see it screened at a future CAAMFest...

HOW: 15 shows via a 35mm print.

No Day Off and the Jeonju Digital Project

Eric Khoo's No Day Off introduces us to Siti, a 24-year-old woman who uproots herself from her home in Sulawesi to attend a two-month training institute on another Indonesian island, so that she can become a live-in maid in one of the world's per capita richest countries, the city-state Singapore. She leaves behind a husband, a new baby and a mountain of debt, which she hopes she will be able to pay off by sending her salary home to the family. However, Siti's debts will grow before they shrink, as the recruiter, trainer and placement service demand such a large cut of her first year's worth of paychecks, that she'd barely be able to afford busfare downtown, even if she did have a maid's day off. As the title indicates, she doesn't; her entire existence is shown to be structured for the convenience and whim of the three distinct families she slaves for over the course of this 39-minute video work.

We catch nothing more than fragmentary glimpses of these employers, as the camera is always trained either on Siti or on the houses and objects she must attend to. The Singaporeans in the film are for us no more than disembodied voices, making demands on or insulting Siti in a language she barely understands. The first family is English-speaking and imperiously wealthy; a bottle of wine costs them more than their maid's salary. As alienating and confining as their mansion must feel to Siti, at least she doesn't have to subsist on unfinished scraps from their dirty dishes, as she does at her second set of employers, a financially struggling Chinese-speaking family that eventually cannot afford to pay her at all. Siti's third and final placement is in the home of a terminally ill father and his often-absent daughter. By far the most benign of the three employers, this household speaks a language Siti can comprehend (presumably Bahasa Melayu, one of Singapore's four official languages, and which I understand is similar, if not essentially identical, to the lingua franca of neighboring Indonesia.) A genuine bond is developed between the maid and the dying man, but it only makes more heartbreaking the moment when Siti must stand by emotionless as the daughter mourns her loss.

No Day Off takes on aspects of a polemic, evidenced by Khoo's insertion of title cards bearing data on the proliferation of the maltreatment of Singaporean immigrant maids between certain segments of the narrative. But, because of the matter-of-fact, diaristic storytelling (each scene is marked by a timestamp indicating how many days Siti has been away from her home and son) it's a remarkably humane one, not a surprise from the director of the lovely Be With Me. Siti's story becomes the empathetic stand-in for all the situations aggregated into the data Khoo periodically presents.

Khoo's short is one of thirty-six thus far commissioned by South Korea's Jeonju Film Festival, each a digital "film" created on a low budget by a one of the modern era's most intriguing filmmakers. The new batch of commissions premieres in Jeonju in April, and includes shorts by Jean-Marie Straub, Claire Denis (who is getting a full retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive next month), and José Luis Guerín. All thirty-three of the other shorts commissioned over the past eleven years of the festival have been screening at the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts screening room over the past week or so. No Day Off plays this Saturday at 7PM, along with shorts by Thailand's Pen-ek Ratanaruang (Last Life in the Universe, Nymph) and Kazakhistan's Darezhan Omirbaev (Kairat, Kardiogram). Later in the weekend there will be entries by Pedro Costa, Eugène Green, Hong Sangsoo, and six other acclaimed filmmakers.

Unlike my friend Adam Hartzell, I haven't been able to attend each and every one of these screenings, but I have seen a sampling, including a rare few that have screened locally before this year. Hong's Jeonju-set Lost in the Mountains was seen at last spring's San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, and feels connected to the three vignettes that make up his latest feature Oki's Movie (I caught this excellent Hong film in Toronto, and hope it appears soon at a Frisco Bay festival or other venue). The version of Shinya Tsukamoto's Haze that screened Thursday night as part of the YBCA series is a condensed (though hardly less intentionally grueling) version of the hour-long existential horror movie that was presented here by IndieFest back in 2006. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Worldy Desires screened at YBCA a couple years ago as well, and I was very pleased to be able to revisit it in anticipation of the week-long release of Apichatpong's outstanding, entrancing new feature Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives at the San Francisco Film Society's dedicated screen at the Kabuki theatre, surely this season's theatrical release most eagerly awaited by the cinephiles in my circles. Worldly Desires takes place on a film set using day-for-night technique in the jungle, just as Uncle Boonmee uses day-for-night filters to achieve a sense of the eternal.

What the Jeonju project provides its filmmakers with is a kind of carte blanche they might have trouble obtaining in the increasingly commercialized world of film financing. The results are as varied as the directors themselves, but what they all surely have in common is that they represent a distillation of the fundamental desires each harbors as an image-maker. In the case of Eric Khoo, and perhaps also of James Benning, whose Pig Iron is a compelling single-shot portrait of the back end of a German steel factory, a socio-political point can be made, whether about immigrant labor or the environmental impact of our species' industrial processes. In the case of Apichatpong, or of Tsai Ming-Liang, whose A Conversation With God is a documentary compilation of Tawianese religious rituals and urban landscapes, the opportunity to purposefully create low-budget video work helps put into relief the filmmaker's approach to 35mm feature filmmaking. In all cases, these filmmakers' works are scarcely if ever shown here on Frisco Bay, which makes YBCA's initiative in showcasing the Jeonju Digital Project a real boon for local cinemagoers.

24th SFIAAFF Preview, Part II

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Every film is a cultural document, packed with signals that reflect the identity of those involved in its creation. Arguably, it's these signals that make films interesting to watch, though sometimes we can lose sight of this and get caught up in the mechanics of narrative or filmmaking technology, as if these are elements that can be wholly extracted from issues of cultural identity. A festival with a geographic, cultural, and cross-cultural focus like the SF International Asian American Film Festival (which opened last night with a sold-out screening of Eric Byler's Award-winning AMERICANese) can help remind those of us who might otherwise wear cultural blinders to look at film through a different lens. No wonder it's such a popular festival in a city like Frisco, where so many residents have traditionally had roots in more than one identity group that it's as if the whole city is a cross-cultural experience.

I couldn't help but use this lens to view a film like Grain in Ear (playing Saturday Mar. 18 at the Kabuki and Sunday Mar. 19 at the Pacific Film Archive) as a portrayal of immigrants, in this case a Korean woman and her young son trying to survive as outsiders in a Chinese coal mining town. Certainly the feelings of isolation and anguish the film portrays are not unique to immigrants, and director Zhang Lu's framing of the film as one about "terrorism" works. It's not what came to my mind while watching the film, though. Rather I watched how the kimchee peddler protagonist Soon-hee's attitude toward her Korean identity and the stereotyping it provokes in her neighbors (not so much her literal neighbors, the genial prostitutes who befriend her young son, but the closed-off larger community) shifts in the film. Early on she meets another Korean-Chinese who seems like a rare opportunity for human connection in an unfriendly town. But this connection only sets off a chain reaction of downwardly-spiraling calamities that culminate in the film's remarkable final shot. This shot has been mentioned in every review of the film I've encountered as notable because it's the only tracking shot in a film filled with static-camera shots. After the building feeling of being held back by a camera lens proscenium, we finally move forward into the action and for me it triggered a strong emotional response. Zhang is almost as sparing in his use of close-ups on the actors' faces; the few that appear are reaction shots to off-screen violent acts, and their presence is crucial. I get the feeling he understands how Brecht's "distancing effect" works a lot better than I do.

Two other films recalled my own limited experience living in an unfamiliar country and dealing with my own cultural baggage. In 1999-2000, while I was working at a high school in Northern Thailand, I took the opportunity to play budget tourist in as many nearby countries as my teaching schedule allowed. I only spent a few days apiece in Phnom Penh and Singapore, so I particularly value the deeper inquiries into life in two very different capital cities provided by the Burnt Theatre and Be With Me, respectively. Both films straddle the line between fiction and documentary. Be With Me (playing Saturday Mar. 18 and Tuesday Mar. 21 at the Kabuki) is categorized by the SFIAAF with the fiction films in the International Showcase, and somewhat resembles the deceptively placid narrative filmmaking style of Tsai Ming-Liang. But unlike some of the films made by Tsai's imitators, Be With Me is unforced in its taciturn motivations. At the nexus of the film's three interlocking stories is a real Singaporean, Theresa Chan, a blind and deaf teacher doing some of the same kind of work we see Fini Strauberger do in Herzog's Land of Silence and Darkness. She's devoted to her work and to typing her autobiography, expressed through subtitles representing an inaudible "voiceover". Her typewriter, the letter a security guard sends writes to a woman he's shy to meet, and the text messages sent between a pair of teenagers discovering their sexuality, make for a tidy set of nonverbal communication motifs.

The Burnt Theatre (playing Tuesday Mar. 21 at the PFA and Wednesday Mar. 22 at the Kabuki), on the other hand, was placed in the SFIAAFF's Documentary Features category. It shows the struggle Cambodian actors are faced with daily in light of the irony that the Bassac National Theatre survived the Khmer Rouge that singled out artists in its horrific genocide, but the structure fell victim to a 1994 fire that has left the artform's few surviving practitioners without a proper place to perform. Still, the theatre's wreckage remains a destination for the artists, many of whom live nearby in one of Phnom Penh's most impoverished shantytowns. The three films I've seen by director Rithy Panh have increasingly blurred the documentary-fiction distinction. S21: the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, which played the 2004 edition of the festival, eschewed documentary conventions like the talking head, the omniscient voiceover, and archival footage. Yet it was most disturbingly memorable for the way it utilized re-enactments: Panh asked former prison guard interviewees to demonstrate the practices they used to terrorize political prisoners. He uses his actor subjects in the Burnt Theatre to go a step or two further, mixing "fly-on-the-wall" documentary footage with dramatized scenes. This sometimes creates a disorienting effect, as in a scene in which one of the actors returns to the theatre triumphant that he'd found work, only to be shunned by his colleagues, disheartened by his willingness to sully his craft by acting in a karaoke video. Is this scene drama or documentary, or perhaps a combination? And how about one of the final moments, in which one of the troupe calls a radio station to request a song and tells the DJ his profession: "early retired actor." It's clear that a number of the film's scenes are staged but as the film progressed I grew less certain which ones. One documentary aspect of the film remained, however: the nearly ubiquitous pounding sound of a Malaysian corporation constructing a humungous casino near the theatre is a reminder that in a globalizing economy, commerce easily trumps aesthetics.

I hope reading these descriptions doesn't make the SFIAAFF seem overly concerned with serious films about serious subjects. My previous preview post highlighted a pair of films that are as close to pure fun as cinematically possible: Citizen Dog and Linda Linda Linda. And tomorrow afternoon's James Shigeta tribute film the Crimson Kimono (3PM at the Castro), while it breaks ground rarely sown subsequently in regard to certain American racial issues, is also purely entertaining as a noir-ish detective movie. Though I'm perhaps most excited about the Heroic Grace II films wrapping up the Berkeley run of the festival with a nice sample of work from four different influential martial arts directors. Chor Yuen's Clans of Intrigue and Korean director Chung Chang-wha's King Boxer play March 24th, while Chang Cheh's the Boxer From Shantung (assistant-directed by John Woo) and Lau Kar Leung's Dirty Ho play March 25th. If the four ShawScope prints look nearly as good as the print of King Hu's Come Drink With Me shown at the SFIAAFF two years ago, the PFA is going to have some happy audiences next weekend.