Edmund Yeo

I have just spent three nights in Tokyo to attend the CineMalaysia Film Festival シネ・マレーシア , a great film festival organized in Tokyo to show Malaysian films. This was its inaugural edition. The film festival ran from the 24th to the 31st of May. I was around for the last two days.

Back in January, I was on Kenneth Chaw's The Star article "Short Films starting to appeal to a bigger audience", discussing about my thoughts on short films . Filmmaker James Lee and Youtube sensation Jinnyboy were interviewed too. Prior to that, Kenneth had actually done a very lengthy email interview with me in preparation for his article. While a number of my quotes were in the final article, I thought I would like to share our entire discussion with everyone. I'm doing it now, with Kenneth's permission. (In truth, I have wanted to do this since January, but, ah, I never had the time.) So, here we go. Kenneth's questions are in bold . My answers will just be... normal text.

This Japanese interview with me was done last November and had been posted on the PIA International Film Festival website . I feel bad that I am posting old news, I never liked clinging to past glories. But for the sake of preservation, and just in case I cannot find the interview anymore, at least I will have records of it here.

I never imagined myself ever appearing on Style: Magazine. Ever. Not in my wildest dreams. Life is pretty insane. But here's Nicole Foo Bihzhu 's feature on me at Style: Magazine. I have to thank my old secondary school classmate Jesly Hieng once again, for scanning this. I was unable to find the magazine anywhere since I got back!

The YxineFF is an annual online short film festival that focuses mostly on Vietnamese short films, and also some South East Asian ones. I met its founder Marcus Manh Cuong Vu at last year's Hamburg International Film Festival, when he moderated the question and answer for THE TIGER FACTORY screening (Ming Jin the director couldn't go, so I went on his behalf as the immensely cute producer). He also later did a short interview with me about Malaysian Independent Cinema and other stuff. I'm very honoured that this year's Yxine Film Festival is doing a mini-focus on me. For a temporary amount of time, four of my previous short films are uploaded online for the viewing pleasure of audiences, all of them except INHALATION are actually loose adaptations of Yasunari Kawabata's works.

Switching to Mandarin... 嗨， 朋友们。 最近接受了中国的《好戏网》访问。 他们已经将采访专题发布在《好戏网》的首页推荐。 若有兴趣的话， 请通过以下链接查看。 呵呵。 我是个比较孤独的人-好戏网专访马来西亚新锐导演杨毅恒 问的问题很仔细，很深奥， 我喜欢。 但是也必须用一点时间思考了才能好好的回答他们。 跟你们分享该文章的摘录。

"CHASING THE DREAM", Erna's profile of me on the brand new Goreng Dot Com website came out two days ago.

Now, this is a surprise! Just received news that I won two awards at the inaugural Doi Saket International Film Festival (facebook page here ). The festival actually ended on the same day as the Tokyo International Film Fest (Oct 31st), but the folks were so busy that they didn't announce the results publicly until few moments ago. I won a Best Editing Award for KINGYO (2009).

(After such a long period of inactivity, I am now bombarding this blog with festival announcements, eek.) This actually started at the beginning of September, but I didn't mention it due to some, er, distractions. Anyway. a one-minute incarnation (or rather, the first scene) of my older short film, LOVE SUICIDES (2009), was one of the 25 finalists selected for FILMINUTE 2010, an international one-minute short film festival. I was a little surprised when I was informed last month by the people at the festival that the first scene of LOVE SUICIDES seemed like a 1-min film by itself! So yeah, after that I decided to extract the scene and sent them as LOVE SUICIDES: PROLOGUE. Watch it here on the Filminute website . (considering that it's only a minute long, I really don't that it'll waste that much of your time. Hah)

On Sunday (25th of July, just a day after the opening of the Skip City Film Fest mentioned in my previous post), I headed off to the Fuji TV headquarters in Odaiba for a screening of LOVE SUICIDES. It was part of the SF7 program . SF stands for 'Student Films', seven universities participated, hence the '7'.

My short film, LOVE SUICIDES (2009) has also been temporarily uploaded online last month as part of Brazil's Fluxus 2010 - International Film Festival on the Internet, so I decided to allow the folks at GUA to host the short for a while as well.

I mentioned in my previous post that the Thai-language short film that I wrote and produced, LADYBIRD'S TEARS, will be having its world premiere at the 23rd Singapore International Film Festival tomorrow (19th of April, 2010). Aside from that, both the shorts that I wrote and directed, LOVE SUICIDES and KINGYO will also be part of their Asian Shorts program. It's quite an honour to have 3 shorts that I was involved in being presented at the film festival.

Okay, I was thinking of writing my thoughts on AVATAR, which I saw and really enjoyed yesterday, but better to give a quick recap of the entire China Mobile Film Festival before I forget about it.

(I've announced this on Twitter and Facebook a few days ago, but haven't actually done it here, so here you go...) Just to share some good news. I picked up the Best Director Award for my short film LOVE SUICIDES at last week's China Mobile Film Festival in Shenzhen.

Last month, the people of CON-CAN Movie Festival decided to hold an awards ceremony in Waseda University because, aside from me, another award winner Nishihara, was also a Waseda student.

Don't think I've mentioned this before, but there's a screening of KINGYO tonight (and the 23rd) at the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival as part of the Asian Shorts 3 program. You can read about it here .

There are actually five different film festivals playing my short films this month, now that Venice Film Fest is over, there are still four more. At this very moment, my short, LOVE SUICIDES, is supposed to be playing at the Split International Film Festival in Croatia, where it was selected for competition. Hopefully the screening will go on smoothly. Suddenly felt that I should have gone straight to Croatia from Venice to attend this festival. Never thought of it earlier. However, I will be going to the Singapore Short Film Fest over the weekend. Would be nice to see some old friends again. Or hearing the voices of old friends telling me they're too busy to meet me.

I'm presenting three of my short films at the KLANG CREATIVE FEST, held in Klang Centro ( map ) on the 8th of August, 4:30pm. (exactly a year after the opening of the Beijing Olympics 2008 :D ) The first one will be the comedy, CHICKEN RICE MYSTERY, which won an Honourable Mention award and a Best Acting award (for lead actress Kimmy) in the BMW Shorties 2008 before screening at the Dubai and Naoussa Film Festivals (Greece).

I've never mentioned this earlier because their website is only in Italian and I wasn't sure about the details. But I was emailed earlier that LOVE SUICIDES will be screening at the Festival Internazionale del Cinema d'Arte in Bergamo, Italy today. The film is one of the 18 short films around the world selected for competition under the Sottoventi category (PDF of the entire line-up ). Once again, I'm honoured. I hope the screening will go well! LOVE SUICIDES will also be screening at some other European festivals over the next few months, you'll be hearing about it here.

Love Suicides I have mentioned this briefly back in April, but I'll mention it again since I've gotten more details now that the official line-up of next month's Paris Cinema International Film Festival is out. So yup, LOVE SUICIDES, my first ever Yasunari Kawabata adaptation before I made KINGYO, is one of the 17 short films around the world selected for competition at the Paris Cinema International Film Fest.