CHICKEN RICE MYSTERY Shoot Is Over!

I've spent the whole weekend shooting CHICKEN RICE MYSTERY. And it's finally over! I was surprised that the shoot went on so smoothly, and despite the crazy weather in the past two days, we managed to overcome the odds!

The whole idea for the CHICKEN RICE MYSTERY screenplay started sometime in last October, when I was borrowing some space from Da Huang Pictures to hold an audition for KURUS. While waiting for candidates to come, I was throwing out short film ideas to filmmakers Liew Seng Tat and Tan Chui Mui in a desperate bid to break my year-long creative drought.

The exchange was like this:

Hooray, I have a cameo role in a NTV7 telemovie

KERAMAT, a telemovie directed by Kannan Thiagarajan that I was involved in back in April will be aired tonight on NTV7 at the ungodly hour of 10:45pm.

If you want to see me in my first screen acting role as the boss of a car repair center, please don't miss my cameo appearance during the first 15 minutes of the film and laugh at my god-awful Malay-speaking skills! (I'm dressed in a grey T-shirt)

Recent Pusan Film Festival award-winning filmmaker Liew Seng Tat and documentary filmmaker/ SURF Magazine writer Zan Azlee also have cameos in this film.

... I served as assistant director for the film too.

VIDEO: CONTROVERSY! Wiping butt with Malay textbook and censored little puppy in 'Flower In The Pocket'

While watching Seng Tat's Flower In The Pocket at its press screening on Wednesday, what stood out to me were two censored scenes in the film.

Liew Seng Tat's Flower In The Pocket 口袋里的花

I have posted about Seng Tat's victory for FLOWER IN THE POCKET at the PUSAN FILM FESTIVAL last month, and I finally got to catch the film at its press screening yesterday. It's hard to review a film properly when you know the filmmaker personally, lauding it too much will make it seem as if you're being nice to a friend, dissing it will mean that you are self-consciously trying to avoid the former.

Liew Seng Tat's 'Flower In The Pocket' Won 2 Awards At Pusan International Film Festival

(Blog post no. 999. Look out for the next one, I'm announcing a contest.)



I'm a couple of days late, but gonna post this:

Girl Disconnected Screening At Malaysian Shorts, March 2007 Edition.

I'm back from Singapore!

My short film, Girl Disconnected had been chosen for screening at the March 2007 edition of Malaysian Shorts!

DATE: 19th of March, 2007
TIME: 8pm
VENUE: HELP INSTITUTE AUDITORIUM, Pusat Bandar Damansara

ADMISSION IS FREE!

I'll be there for the Q & A session, although if I really get the chance to speak, I'll try not to babble as much as I did during last month's Filmmakers' Anonymous 2 (I was, ah, both excited and nervous at the same time then, being its Malaysian premiere and all, you see).

For the whole line-up of that night, I'll copy and paste directly from Amir Muhammad's message I got from the Malaysian Cinema mailing list.

C. L. Hor's The 3rd Generation is a Malaysian film masterpiece.

[Disclaimer: This entire post was written with a lot of sarcasm.]

It happened more than a week ago, when I chanced upon Jesscet's entry (I believe she's a writer for KL Lifestyle and possibly a journalist for Malay Mail) about the Malaysian production, 'The Third Generation' where she mentioned that the film being billed as the very first 'Cantonese art film in Malaysia'.

Never much of a fan of anyone who labels non-mainstream films as 'art films, I left a comment showing my curiosity.

"First Cantonese art film in Malaysia? Really? What about those stuff by James Lee? I just feel that the term 'art film' is highly subjective. Usually used to describe aethestically-pleasing (that's rather debatable) non-mainstream films ala Wong Kar Wai's works, or in America, non-mainstream films that are shown in arthouse cinemas (instead of those cineplexes), knowing that 'art' films are generally non-profitable, I find it strange that the filmmakers of 'The Third Generation' would label their own film as an 'art' film. Let alone, the first ever in Malaysia."

(Note: I mentioned James Lee because his 'Beautiful Washing Machine' was mostly in Cantonese, whilst both Ho Yuhang and Tan Chui Mui's works were in Mandarin)

SEPET by Yasmin Ahmad, an important film in the Malaysian New Wave

One of the movies I heard most of when I returned to Malaysia had, strangely, been a local film, which is something unheard of considering that at this time of the year, summer Hollywood blockbusters are the ones that rule the box-office. This local film is Yasmin Ahmad's 'Sepet' which had been making waves at some foreign film festivals, and became quite a subject of discussion among Malaysians, not just the Malays, but also many of the Chinese I know. Finally got to watch it during my flight from Malaysia to Perth.

'Sepet' depicts an interracial romance between a Chinese guy and a Malay gal. And being an interracial romance, it obviously shows the complications involved in interracial romance, like the clashing of cultures, the condemnation of narrow-minded friends, the inability of acceptance by parents. Can true love transcend all these barriers?