Edmund Yeo

I was quite surprised when Radoslav Sharapanov left a comment on my recent Andrei Tarkovsky Facebook post that today is actually Tarkovsky's birthday. Tarkovsky died in 1986 at the relatively young age of 54, when I was only 2. He would have been 80 years old this year. Same age as my grandmother.

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.

Marc Saint-Cyr had posted a review of THE WHITE FLOWER at J-Film Pow-Wow. Here's an excerpt: Suitably, the still photography used throughout “The White Flower” is incredibly beautiful, possessing much richness, crisp clarity and great attention to framing and lighting in every shot. In fact, viewers are likely to be doubly grateful for the slideshow-like manner in which the shots progress, as it allows them to better savor each image while seeming to magnify and expand each of the contemplative, intimate moments that comprise the film’s episodic structure. Read the full review ! THE WHITE FLOWER was recently screened at the InDPanda International Short Film Festival in Hong Kong.

me pointing at the WHITE FLOWER still Leaving from Hong Kong to Guangzhou the day after the world premiere of THE WHITE FLOWER left me Twitter-less, Facebook-less, Youtube-less and Blogger-less, hence the lack of updates. So, back to the screening of THE WHITE FLOWER. On the night of the 26th, I finally got to screen my experimental THE WHITE FLOWER to the public at the Broadway Cinematheque .

This was actually posted on Twitch a while ago (my friends at Toronto J-Film Pow Wow covered it too ), but I've been so busy with my own shoots back in Malaysia that I didn't get around to sharing it with you guys. My experimental short, THE WHITE FLOWER, which I shot last year, is finally making its world premiere at the Hong Kong InDpanda Short Film Festival next week. To commemorate this, I cut together a trailer for the short. It's an experimental film based on Yasunari Kawabata's short story of the same title, constructed mostly with still photos like Chris Marker's LA JETEE. It's my third Kawabata adaptation after LOVE SUICIDES and KINGYO. Here's a synopsis. A young Chinese woman living in Tokyo is haunted by remnants of a forbidden relationship and a dark family past. She ends up in a sanitarium and meets a doctor conflicted between his job and his personal feelings. After being discharged, she meets a wandering Thai filmmaker contemplating

I've been having problems sleeping again. The past week when my family were around, I had my most normal sleeping schedule in MONTHS. Sleeping around 1am, waking up around 8-9am, it was healthy. After finishing my latest THE WHITE FLOWER (I now have the film in screener DVDs, but there will still be some minor tweaks here and there before it really premieres), its month-long post-production leading to some of the craziest, most irregular sleeping time for myself (I would take a brief nap from 11pm to 1-2am, wake up, orchestrate net meetings with Niklas the cinematographer and Woan Foong the composer, getting materials for them to continue the progress of the film, and then updating them by uploading some footage online for them to view etc.) I started having breakfast before I sleep at around 9-10am. still from THE WHITE FLOWER The best thing is that I get to skip lunch (which isn't served for free in my dorm, haha) since I often sleep through the noon and wake up around 2pm. I

25th to 26th of November. That was the deadline I gave myself to finish my latest film THE WHITE FLOWER. Since KINGYO, I haven't had a film that had such a long post-production, and to think that KINGYO was only 6 months ago. So I've reached the final stages of tweaking the film before doing my first batch of preview screeners for the film.

Today's my mom's birthday. Happy birthday, mom. But I'll get to that later. I am still knee deep in the post-production of my new film THE WHITE FLOWER, which I'm trying to complete by end of this month.

It's strange how quickly a week had just flown by like that. It happens all the time when I'm in post-production for a film. Each day just goes by in a blur, and I myself lose the concept of day and night, for the past few nights I had spent sleepless nights in the editing lab for my new short film THE WHITE FLOWER. I usually go home around 6am, sometimes I get to eat breakfast, and then sleep at around 8am, then waking up at 12pm, and then going back to work again. THE WHITE FLOWER is a challenging film because, aside from it being constructed almost entirely with still photos (which is a nightmare to edit by itself), I myself still have to various sound jobs. Recording voiceover narrations from the three main characters, recording sound effects, downloading sound effects, discussing with my two primary collaborators, Niklas (the cinematographer) and Woan Foong (the composer) about what I need for the film through the net (Niklas is in Finland, Woan Foong is in US), because

I went to Honjo at Saitama yesterday for a KINGYO screening at the Unicus Cinema (it's a multiplex in a shopping mall called Unicus). I think it was for the opening event of their inaugural Honjo Kodama Area Film Festival. Both my film, and a Chinese-Japanese co-produced documentary (also from the lab I'm), Shaolin Kungfu, were there. My friends, Yang Yang and Zifeng, were the editors of that film. This is me in Professor Ando's (executive producer of KINGYO) car, heading to the multiplex, with Maiko, Zifeng and Yang Yang.

The shoot for THE WHITE FLOWER ended around 12:30am this morning. I borrowed my friend Zhi Feng's house for the shoot. Everything was so hectic that I forgot to whip out my own camera until we were about to finish things.

The cast and crew of THE WHITE FLOWER on top of the Futtsu Viewpoint structure. From left to right: Niklas the cinematographer, Zhu Dan the actress, me, Toro Inamura the actor, Kong the assistant director/ reluctant actor 31st of July. Principal photography for my short film, THE WHITE FLOWER (mentioned in my previous post ) began.

(Photo by Martha K ) I'm flying back to Malaysia next Monday (3rd of August), and thus ends the dream-like 3rd session of my stay in Japan. Long have my Finnish friend Niklas and I have spoken about working on a project together, in fact, when we went to explore the abandoned ruins in Sagamiko back in May, our true intention was location scouting.