Rest in peace, Kaneto Shindo

The Japanese director Kaneto Shindo passed away yesterday at the age of 100.

Theo Angelopoulos mini-retrospective and documentary

Last week, just a day before I headed off to Ningbo China for a short trip over the weekend, I walked past the nearby arthouse theater Waseda Shochiku and paused when I noticed that they were screening three Theo Angelopoulos films in a span of two weeks.



The films were:

Why film festivals matter to me

(UPDATED: This blog post was initially a repost of an email on the Malaysian Cinema mailing list from Venice Film Festival programmer Paolo Bertolin asking for the means to contact FINAS (the National Film Development Corporation of Malaysia). Was hoping that posting this in public would help him get a reply.

He got it, problem solved, so as per his request, I'll remove his email exchanges in the mailing list. And expand more on my last few paragraphs regarding my thoughts about film festivals. It's sort of a love letter for film festivals, perhaps.)

Ying Liang, James Cameron, The New Yorker

I wrote about Ying Liang's horrifying situation with the Chinese authorities a few days ago, the responses were surprising. Although many of our friends in the circle were already aware of the situation and had communicated with him on Facebook, other friends of mine were very nice to help spread the news around on Twitter and Facebook. This news was picked up by Richard Brody of The New Yorker.

Brody had written in the magazine about Ying Liang's previous films, which, to tell you the truth, I haven't really seen. (I'll rectify that soon), and in his blog post, Brody had many nice things to say about Ying Liang's films.

Ying Liang - A Chinese filmmaker's plight

Two weeks ago, I translated Professor Si-Tu Zhao Dun's words of wisdom about how film directing as a profession does not really exist shared by my friend, the Chinese filmmaker Ying Liang.

BUDDYZ on Astro Ria

BUDDYZ is a series of 5-minute minisodes on the Astro Ria channel presented by Digi. It stars Alif Satar, Syed Ali, Erin Malek and Elliza Razak, with special appearances by Shaheizy Sam.

I actually directed it. (You might remember back in March that I mentioned about directing a Malay TV series. Yes, it does look rather different from my usual output) The series finally came out on Tuesday (1st of May), followed by the second episode on Thursday (2nd of May).

Sadly, being in Japan, I can't really watch any of them.

When what you desire in life bleeds into video games...

A week ago, after having a rough cut of my latest short film shown to financiers and clients, I decided to take a sabbatical. (Usually, after a film shoot, I would immediately jump into putting the footage together, editing them, seeing whether what I got had been what I've envisioned, or, perhaps I got something better than I hoped. But once I'm done with a first rough cut, I would for myself to adhere to usual industry beliefs, and to take a break from the footage so that I could come back to it with fresh eyes, approaching the materials with much more objectivity and distance. Because of the freeform improvisational nature of my usual filmmaking methods, I tend to "make discoveries" of my films through post-production)

Therefore, during this break, I intended to just do some researching, finding inspiration from other films regarding the editing, finishing up a book that I was reading (currently reading: Italo Calvino's THE BARON IN THE TREES), follow the NBA Playoffs.

Oh, and maybe play a game...

So I installed SKYRIM.

Film directing as a profession does not really exist

I saw this posted on Facebook by the Chinese filmmaker Ying Liang. He was passing to his students words of wisdom from his own teacher, Professor Si-Tu Zhao Dun.



The whole thing is in Chinese, so it's actually better if you can read it in its original language as my translation will be pretty shaky:

Here's the original:

Instagram photos of the week: End of cherry blossom season

Been busy with the post-production of my new film, and also dealing with a couple of deadlines. So I'll just entertain this very silent blog with more stunningly beautiful photos that I uploaded on Instagram during the past week.

The photos I posted had one recurring theme, the end of the much-loved cherry blossom season in Japan. Usually it's signaled by some heavy rain.

Thoughts on 31st Hong Kong Film Awards / Ode to Lau Ching Wan

The 31st Hong Kong Film Awards was held on Sunday night. I was following the results on Facebook and Twitter because I didn't know where else can I catch a live telecast of it in Japan.

A SIMPLE LIFE by Ann Hui ended up as the big winner of the night, winning Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Screenplay and probably a few others I didn't count.

I haven't seen it, so there's not much I can say.

But I ended up writing my thoughts about each of the acting award winners on Facebook, which I'm going to share here. (and I will expand on what I wrote if I can)

My (stunningly beautiful, of course) Instagram photos of the week

The past week had been pretty busy for me. I was "supervising" the post-production of the TV thing that I shot in Malaysia last month (when I said supervising, I pretty much meant "jumping into the whole damn thing and doing a lot of re-editing myself), while simultaneously doing the pre-production for a short film (that I'm shooting right now).

Anyway, you might notice that numerous photos I've posted on this page were from Instagram, a service I rather liked because of the way it could enhance my iPhone photos. Everyone's talking about it now since it got acquired by Facebook for a measly sum of $1 billion dollars, I also thought that the photos I took had been increasingly awesome, so I'm sharing the ones that I have taken in the past week.