Ryusuke Hamaguchi's wonderful HAPPY HOUR, like the Iwai Shunji retrospective, was also part of the Japan Now section in the Tokyo International Film Festival.
I need to give props to Japan Now. Ever since the festival started this section last year, with Ando-sensei (yup, my former university professor Kohei Ando-sensei1!!) serving as programming advisor, the section has become one of the main attractions of the festival. The screening of noteworthy (of commercial or critical merit) Japanese films of the past year, complete with Q and A sessions moderated by Ando-sensei, had been great!
I remember having dinner with Ando-sensei in August right after he had served as jury member of the Guanajuato International Film Festival (where he saw Happy Hour for the very first time and awarded it the Best International Feature Narrative award) and we discussed about the trickiness of trying to program this film at the Tokyo International Film Festival due to its length (5 hours!!!) I said to Ando-sensei that if the film would ever show in the festival, I will definitely go and see it.
I'm very glad Ando-sensei managed to program the film, and made the experience even richer by making it an all-nighter screening!
I wrote this on Facebook last month, after watching Iwai Shunji's Love Letter at the Tokyo International Film Festival. I have seen this film countless times in various forms, on VCD, on DVD, on digital file, either on TV or on computer, but never on the big screen, so that particular screening in Tokyo left me overwhelmed, and of course, nostalgic.
Here's my love letter to the film Love Letter:
I saw Iwai Shunji's Love Letter (2005) on the big screen today. Sometimes you see a film at the right time, at the right age, so you fall in love with it in ways you cannot imagine.
It was 1998. I was 14 when I first saw Love Letter, I think this might be the film that made me fell in love with Japanese cinema, the emotional impact it left me was immense. The lyricism, the romanticism, the pain of unspoken love and the melancholy of memories, I was intoxicated by these vivid feelings through this film. I loved a little more, contemplated a little more, daydreamed a little more, became more obsessed with the snow. Films can do these things to you, when you see it at the right time, at the right age.
It's already been a month and I never had the chance to write about the Tokyo International Film Festival.
This always happens when I'm preparing for a film shoot. I lose track of time. Today becomes yesterday, tomorrow becomes today, and I don't even notice it.
Last month I went to the Tokyo International Film Festival for the world premiere of the omnibus project, Asian Three-Fold Mirror: Reflections. I was one of the producers of the segment, Pigeon by Isao Yukisada (along with Ming Jin and Shunsuke Koga-san)
So, here are some photos of me at the red carpet. I managed to meet popular actor Saitoh Takumi, whom I met two years ago in Bali when he was doing the film Taksu. I also met Rin Takanashi, the star of Abbas Kiarostami's final film Like Someone in Love.
Earlier this year, I was involved as one of the producers for director Isao Yukisada's "Pigeon", his segment for the omnibus project Asian Three-fold Mirror 2016: Reflections 『アジア三面鏡2016：リフレクションズ』 (check out the photos posted by cast and crew), produced by The Japan Foundation Asian Center and Tokyo International Film Festival.
Its trailer is finally out!
English version.
And Japanese version.
The Japan Foundation Asia Center and Tokyo International Film Festival have co-produced the first of the Asian Omnibus Film series, Asian Three-Fold Mirror 2016: Reflections.
The Asian Three-Fold Mirror project brings together three globally-acclaimed, talented directors from Asia to co-create a series of omnibus films with a common theme. The first of the omnibus film series, Asian Three-Fold Mirror 2016, reflects on history and culture in their chosen countries to create new light. Under the theme of “Living in Asia”, crew and cast joined forces across national borders to depict the lives of characters who journey between Japan and Cambodia, the Philippines and Malaysia. New films have been created to help bring together the people in Asia.
“Asian Three-Fold Mirror 2016: Reflections”
■SHINIUMA Dead Horse
Director ：BRILLANTE MA MENDOZA / Cast： LOU VELOSO
■”Pigeon”
Director ：ISAO YUKISADA / Cast： MASAHIKO TSUGAWA、SHARIFAH AMANI、MASATOSHI NAGASE
■”Beyond The Bridge”
Director ：SOTHO KULIKAR / Cast： MASAYA KATO、CHUMVAN SODHACHIVY、OSAMU SHIGEMATSU
Co-production by The Japan Foundation Asia Center & Tokyo International Film Festival / Supported by Imagica / General Producer： TAKEO HISAMATSU
（C）2016 The Japan Foundation, All Rights Reserved.
Five years ago, I wrote about the Karayuki-san. The Japanese women who were sold or smuggled into Southeast Asia (mostly pre-independence Malaysia and Singapore) to work as prostitute from the late 19th century to early 20th century.
For reasons I cannot comprehend or explain, it became something that had haunted my mind for the past half decade. Maybe because this was a part of Japanese/ Malaysian history (countries obviously close to my heart) that was gradually being forgotten, so I became increasingly curious, and determined to commit their stories into film.
There are publications about them, but films? The only ones I am aware of are still Kumai Kei's Oscar-nominated SANDAKAN NO. 8 (1974) and Shohei Imamura's KARAYUKI-SAN, THE MAKING OF A PROSTITUTE (1975). The former is a fictionalized retelling of their plight, the latter is a documentary.
I finally found time to watch the documentary last night. In the documentary, the director Shohei Imamura was interviewing an old lady named Kikuyo Zendo, a former Karayuki-san. As they walked through familiar places like Klang and revisit locations of her memories, before finally revealing that at that time she was staying at Petaling Jaya, I was sort of shocked. Was she staying within my neighbourhood? Where I live now is an area that had existed long before my birth. In 30 years of my life I have been staying mostly in this house. A decade or two before my birth, she was probably roaming the same area.
People come and go, history happens, time is constantly moving. I don't know why this felt like such a big deal. Perhaps I am not used to seeing familiar places from a different time through the prisms of another.
In this effortless documentary I relearned many things that I have learnt during my years of researching the Karayuki-san, while also getting nuggets of information that I never knew before. When everything is recounted in first person, and committed to celluloid, the feeling is a little different from reading it from books.
But you can find the entire film on Youtube, unfortunately, it only has French subtitles. Yet if you are curious, I still recommend that you scan through the film. Many of it transcend language anyway.
One thing I need to note is that many publications and articles about this documentary, including the seminal AH KU AND THE KARAYUKI-SAN book have mentioned that the locales visited by Imamura and Kikuyo were in Singapore.
But watching the documentary myself. I'm rather sure that all of Kikuyo's interviews were conducted in Malaysia, in areas around Kuala Lumpur. Like Cheras (the nursing home), Klang (the port at the opening, the ship, the previous brothels), Petaling Jaya (Kikuyo's home) etc. Even the cemetery they went to seemed very much like the Japanese cemetery in Kuala Lumpur, and not Singapore.
Ever since the passing of the Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami, I've found myself remembering the brief personal memories I have of him. They were all very fleeting.
Cannes Film Festival 2010
Merely that Ming Jin and I, along with Fooi Mun, our The Tiger Factory lead actress saw him at the MK2 party and had to hurriedly (and politely) stop him to take these photos before he was about to leave.
Once again I've been restoring and uploading some of the old short films that Ming Jin and I had made over the past decade onto the Greenlight Pictures Youtube channel.
My latest upload is Ming Jin's 2005 short film CATCHING THE SEA, which stars Pete Teo and Liew Seng Tat and served as a precursor (or spin-off) for his feature film THE ELEPHANT AND THE SEA.
Recently, as I was finishing up a making-of documentary that I was working on in the past few months, I decided to do some research on other great making-of documentaries. It's always great to seek inspiration from the masters, and I was also thinking of an Andrei Tarkovsky documentary that I watched on Youtube a year or two ago, Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky.
The past few weeks I've been uploading some of the older films, shorts and telemovies that Ming Jin and I had done over the past decade on the Greenlight Pictures Youtube channel.
Last night I've uploaded AFTERNOON RIVER, EVENING SKY.
I made this short film in 2009. Because it had the misfortune of being made between my (relatively more high-profiled short films) KINGYO and the INHALATION/ EXHALATION pair, this short (along with a few others I made within those few months) kinda got lost in the shuffle.
The music video I directed for pop star Nicole Lai is finally out! Had a lot of fun doing this, time was short, I shot this during a brief break between two festival trips. Please check it out!
The 55-minute film will be having its Singapore premiere on 30th June, 7:30pm as part of the Singapore International Festival of Arts. Screening will be held at The Projector! Apply for a pass (so you can catch all screenings at the festival) or buy a single ticket here:
In fact, the version screened in Singapore will actually be a brand new version of the film. As I start to understand more on how to use Da Vinci Resolve during the past few weeks for colour grading, I decided to take his film and rework it again, being not too happy with its look in its previous iterations. It was good practice, and I regret a little that I didn't know how to use Da Vinci Resolve earlier.
SYNOPSIS: Filmmaker Woo Ming Jin and his crew travel across the peninsula of Malaysia and Singapore in search of the lost film Seruan Merdeka (1947). Seruan Merdeka is the first post World War II film made in Malaya. It is also the first film in the history of Malaysian cinema to feature a biracial cast of Malays and Chinese.
While gradually uncovering information about the lost film, a doorway into one of Malaya’s most turbulent times – the Japanese Occupation – is revealed. In their recollection of the past, the crew gathers together testimonies and interviews from locals across all races and walks of life in an effort to examine the country’s history. Long forgotten memories of abandoned theatres, unspoken histories and lost films are brought to the surface in a startling confrontation between cinema and reality.
THE SECOND LIFE OF THIEVES (2014) by Woo Ming Jin, which I produced, co-wrote and edited, has been released digitally on FilmDoo! So please, go and watch it, I promise you it's something different from this part of the world. It's probably one of the rare gay films made in Malaysia.
I first read about Liliosa Hilao a couple of years ago. I cannot really remember how did I actually stumble upon her story then. I was in Tokyo, I was binge-reading the colourful history of Philippines on Wikipedia, and like a labyrinth, it led me to unexpected places, namely the sad story of Liliosa Hilao. The atrocities that happened to her during Martial Law were painful to read, and after I was done, I remained haunted by it.
A few years later, when I finally started making my film RIVER OF EXPLODING DURIANS, I decided to incorporate scenes of a high school class reenacting forgotten ASEAN history, because I was hoping to preserve these in cinema. The truth is, our education system, our history books, just like those in this region, are rather insular and limited, many things weren't allowed for discussion. How then, can we grow if we were kept constantly in a bubble?
One of the scenes in RIVER OF EXPLODING DURIANS is a reenactment of Liliosa Hilao's story. I decided to upload it a few days ago when I heard of the ongoing political situation in Philippines, where Bongbong Marcos, son of Ferninand Marcos, was running for vice president. A subject of great consternation for many, especially those who had to endure Martial Law. Since many were discussing about how the atrocities were being forgotten, I realized I had to share Liliosa's story to the public.
It took 2 days before it caught on, and to my surprise, the feedback and responses since then had been overwhelming. It's something I've never experienced before. What moved me most was to actually hear from the family of Liliosa Hilao. When I was reading about Liliosa Hilao's story all those years ago, I would never expect to do something that could reach her family. Life is full of surprises. I'm very humbled by this experience.
Instead of working on my script, I ended up procrastinating and checking out my long dormant Youtube page.
I then realized that I've actually been a Youtube user since 2006. That's 10 years. That's a really long time!
I remember a couple of these video-sharing sites coming out around the same time during my final year in Perth, and I was trying a few time. All of them didn't last, except for Youtube.
Many of my really old videos are still there, stuff I shot when I just got to Perth. Learning how to operate a camcorder, teaching myself how to edit with an editing software (I was using Sony Vegas).
I have often wondered whether I should just delete these damn videos since I've already moved on. What I made then were embarrassingly personal (they are video diaries anyway), and not exactly the type of thing I would want people to associate myself. I want people to stumble upon trailers of River of Exploding Durians, Kingyo, Inhalation, Last Fragments of Winter etc. (ahem, basically the stuff from this playlist) And not my Murdoch University student projects in 2006! Not the little "short films" I did with friends in 2005 and 2004 when I didn't even know what filmmaking was!!!
But then, they are part of the journey, and they lead to what I am now, so I'll just keep them... for the time being.
Most of them are snippets that seem more fitting for Facebook video. But Facebook hasn't existed when I shot them. So there.
These stuff were actually shot and edited in 2004, when I just got to Perth. They were literally the first ever videos I've ever done.
Since then, I've been posting and retweeting a lot about him on Facebook and Twitter.
I always knew who he was as he grew up, but wasn't really truly exposed to his greatness until I saw that Super Bowl Halftime Show. That was epic and spine-tingling.
Two days later, when a friend lost her Macbook and External Hard Disk, and was entirely distraught, all I could do was to ask her to believe in the goodness of humanity by watching Prince's Super Bowl Halftime Show.
This 2005 short film by Woo Ming Jin was made during the height of the period which some had referred to as the "Malaysian New Wave". It was a time when a tight-knit group of filmmakers in the country started making films together, or helping each other by taking different roles in the production. It was the rise of DV cameras and digital filmmaking, which gave many the chance to make their own films.
The two leads of this short film are actually fellow filmmakers Tan Chui Mui and Liew Seng Tat, who were a year or two before they each made their breakthrough feature debuts, LOVE CONQUERS ALL and FLOWER IN THE POCKET.
Here's the synopsis:
In this black comedy about the disintegration of a love affair, a young woman's (Tan Chui Mui) loneliness in the midst of Kuala Lumpur's metropolitan sprawl triggers a tenuous relationship with a naïve salesman (Liew Seng Tat) who has a tendency to please and over-emote.
Sharifah Amani plays Yasmin in PIGEON. Yasmin is named after the late great Yasmin Ahmad.
Well, the awesome thing about social media and smart phones is that many film shoots are now being chronicled and posted about endlessly, relentlessly, by the cast and crew of the film.
It wasn't like that 5-6 years ago, when all you had was one person taking production photos, and then posting them online later. (This blog had served this purpose back then with the earlier shoots that I was involved in)
As for the PIGEON shoot last week, naturally, the cast and crew, and even director Isao Yukisada himself, were posting photos on Facebook and Instagram while the shoot was happening. I don't exactly have everyone's Instagram account (director Yukisada has more of a following on Facebook, which he is more active on, but his Instagram account is growing)
I'm going to be sharing the ones from the director, the main cast members Sharifah Amani, Nas T, Sherry Alhadad, and also TK the line producer/assistant director and Boon the Production Designer. They all have really awesome accounts which are worth following!
I am actually in charge of doing the making-of documentary for this short film, and I'm thinking of incorporating these posts into my documentary. It's something I will have to think more about.
Now, enjoy the posts!
(Sharifah Amani's posts were particularly emotional)
From the 29th of March to 5th of April in the past two weeks, I was involved in the film shoot of Isao Yukisada's PIGEON. Greenlight Pictures and I were the Malaysian producers for this project, which is a segment in Tokyo Film Fest's upcoming omnibus project Asian Three-Fold Mirror.
Shot mostly in Penang, with Malaysian and Japanese cast and crew members (... and one Thai sound guy), this 30-minute short film stars Sharifah Amani, Masahiro Tsugawa, Masatoshi Nagase, Sherry Alhadad, Nas T Muammar Zar, Sherry Alhadad.
The photo album for this shoot is going to be constantly updated for the next few days.
PIGEON is a segment of the "Asian Three-Fold Mirror 2016" omnibus film directed by Isao Yukisada.The short film was...
I felt a slight regret that I've never seen more of his films. Yet I remember very well the first. The very first Rivette film I saw would turn out to be his last, AROUND A SMALL MOUNTAIN. Caught this at the Tokyo International Film Festival in 2009. It was a rather peculiar experience. Many of the film is set in a circus, where occasionally the line between reality and fiction is blurred, the theatricality of life is mirrored by the performances in the circus. I was a little confounded.
After that film I wanted to find out more about his previous films, and I was recommended two films that were considered his masterpieces. 3-hour CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING and the 12 1/2-hour long (!!) OUT 1 (Out 1, noli me tangere). I got hold of these films a few years ago, saw half of CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING, but didn't start with the latter. Perhaps I was intimidated by the length then, even though that was the particular period of time when I indulged myself in some of the longer films in history, like Bela Tarr's SATANTANGO, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ and a few of Theo Angelopoulos' earlier works. Committing to these long films can be a rather unique experience, like locking yourself in a room to binge-read a novel. You find yourself following not just the plot and characters, but immersing yourself completely in the world that was constructed, its particularly rhythm, and replaying earlier moments of the film in your mind which felt like an eternity ago.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the problems that the Busan International Film Festival had been facing recently. Basically the government had not been pleased that the festival had been screening a documentary about the sinking of MV Sewol in 2014. Since then, there had been one political attack after another, mostly attempts to force festival director Lee Yongkwan to step down, while the festival had to subject itself to censors.
It's horrifying to see a film festival become a pawn of politics. Film festivals exist as platforms for filmmakers to express themselves artistically, to show different perspectives, different cultures, different voices of different countries of the world, to educate the audiences, to educate the filmmakers. Film festivals exist for many things, therefore it's unsurprising that many directors and other film people have voiced their support for the Busan Film Festival over the last few weeks.
Yesterday, famed writer and festival programmer Tony Rayns wrote an open letter regarding this matter. This letter allows us to contemplate more on the value of film festivals, especially one as historic as Busan Film Fest. How the growth of a festival can affect the economy, culture and others of a particular country.
Tony Rayns writes an open letter to the people of Busan supporting the work of Busan International Film Festival...
Posted by Edmund Yeo on Thursday, January 28, 2016
I'm just gonna copy and paste the entire letter here, because this is necessary.
David Bowie had just passed away. It's so sudden. I just got his latest album BLACKSTAR last night. I wanted to listen to BLACKSTAR in is entirety.
But for me, with Bowie, like most people, it started with Space Oddity. I'm posting his performance of the song, along with the various covers that I could find on Youtube. To help myself remember.
I haven't been posting too much about RETURN TO NOSTALGIA since its world premiere last October. RETURN TO NOSTALGIA is a documentary directed by Woo Ming Jin as part of Busan International Film Fest's POWER OF ASIAN CINEMA series last year. For this series, 10 directors from 10 different Asian countries were each invited to make a 50-minute documentary regarding their own country's cinematic history. We were honoured to represent Malaysia.
Last night, we had the very first local screening of the RETURN TO NOSTALGIA, and the response had been immense, there weren't even enough seats for the audiences!
But before that, I would like to share with you all its trailer.
The Busan International Film Festival had getting a lot of pressure from the city of Busan after the screenings of a documentary, DIVING BELL in Busan International Film Festival 2014. They had (unofficially) asked for the resignation of the festival director LEE Yong-kwan and exercised political pressure on BIFF, like slashing the festival budget last year (Busan International Film Festival 2014 also happened to be the 20th anniversary edition of the festival)
They believe that putting pressure on them is a political retaliation and interference, I believe the same to. All Korean filmmakers and groups are standing tall together to secure the freedom of speech and artistic expressions, and keep BIFF from any kinds of political intervention.
Filmmakers from the rest of the world are doing the same too.
