34th Edition of Singapore International Film Festival Brings Back Prestigious Film Awards, Spices Up Festival Programming with Award-Winning Films

30 November 2023, Thursday

7 PM to 11 PM

Shaw Lido Theatres

Opening Night

TIGER STRIPES

Directed by Amanda Nell Eu

2 December 2023, Saturday

3 PM to 6:30 PM

Shaw Lido Theatres

Special Presentation / Cinema Icon Award Presentation

GREEN NIGHT

Directed by Han Shuai

2 December 2023, Saturday

3 PM to 6:30 PM

Shaw Lido Theatres

Silver Screen Awards Presentation

• Outstanding Contribution to Southeast Asian Cinema Award
• Asian Feature Films Competition
• Southeast Asian Short Films Competition
• Southeast Asian Film Lab
• Youth Critics Programme

Asian Feature Film Competition

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Thien An Pham, 2023)

After his sister-in-law dies in an accident, Thien is forced to leave Saigon to bring her body back to her hometown and look after his young nephew. Ill-prepared to be a guardian, Thien searches for his brother who vanished years ago.

Snow In Midsummer (Chong Keat Aun, 2023)

13 May 1969: Ah Eng’s life is forever altered by the deadly racial riots breaking out across Kuala Lumpur. 49 years after the fateful night when she sought shelter with migrants of The Injustice to Dou E Cantonese opera troupe, Ah Eng finds her life invariably intertwined with the heroine Dou E who is similarly unable to move on from the tragedy. In expansive wide shots, Snow in Midsummer frames history in a proscenium and renders its characters as pawns in a political arena. Lamenting their helplessness, the film stages a reconciliation between past and present, forcing a nation to confront its failure to address a contentious episode in its history.

Critical Zone (Ali AHMADZADEH, 2023)

The night has just begun for Amir when he collects his share of drugs from a covert tunnel passage. Upon reaching home, he falls into a familiar routine of repackaging cannabis and leisurely sampling its potency. Guided by the didactic voice of his GPS, Amir does the rounds through Tehran’s nightscape. He deals drugs, reckons with his own woes, meets and soothes tormented souls, all while basking in glimmers of freedom before dawn. A drama shot in secret without the permission of the regime, Critical Zone turns this precarity into a hallucinatory portrayal of the cross-currents in contemporary Iran. In this filmic world, social phenomena such as drug use resist easy judgements.

Southeast Asian Short Film Competition

Cross My Heart Hope to Die (Sam Manacsa, 2023)

Struggling with unpaid work, Mila finds comfort in a love interest through his constant phone calls. But a promise of hope may also lead to tragedy and sad love songs.

Cross My Heart Hope to Die is centered around the themes of worker exploitation, love, romance, and crime, and was also screened in Venice Short Film Competition this year.

Basri and Salma (Khozy Rizal, 2023)

In this Southeast Asian Premiere, a married couple runs a mobile carnival, joyfully entertaining others’ kids. Amid family meddling, doubts and a revelatory conflict, the reason for their childlessness emerges. Basri and Salma was also the SGIFF Southeast Asian Short Film Fund Recipient for 2022

Singapore Panorama

Wonderland (Chai Yee Wei, 2023)

Starring several well-known Singaporean actors from the 2000s, two middle-aged fathers bond over their love for their daughters in this affecting dramedy about friendship in our golden years.

Chai Yee Wei’s short film Benjamin’s Last Day at Katong Swimming Complex was also screened at SGIFF in 2017.

A Year of No Significance (Kelvin Tong, 2023)

Chinese-educated architect Lim is at a crossroads in 1970s Singapore where English is increasingly adopted in the workplace. Sidelined at work, he sees little hope of career advancement. Meanwhile, Lim also contends with a broken marriage and caring for an overbearing father. The winds of change are blowing fast and strong, but Lim will not go gently. Confronting his failure at work and as a husband and son, Lim does what it takes to survive, even as the fabric of his life and identity begins to fissure rapidly. A Year of No Significance is an elegy to a Singapore in the throes of change. The film’s measured direction presents a sensitive reclamation of a history that is often forgotten.

Foreground

Hours with Gaspar (Yosep Anggi Noen, 2023)

Gaspar, a fighter in a fight club, is a hardboiled detective scouring the underground for the truth behind a childhood friend’s disappearance—a task made all the more urgent after news that his heart will give way in 24 hours. Assisted by Cortazar, a motorcycle possessed by a cheetah’s spirit, Gaspar uncovers a criminal ring and enlists a motley crew for a collective vengeance.

Adapted from Sabda Armandio’s novel, this joyride presents an immaculately controlled display of the dystopic, sci-fi, heist and thriller genres, while elevating the power of myth and faith in alleviating the burden of memory and guilt.

All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh, 2023)

First premiered at Telluride, All of Us Strangers follows Adam as he returns to his childhood home and finds the apparitions of his dead parents living like normal, never having aged a day. He visits them frequently, reflecting upon his difficult childhood growing up as a closeted gay boy. Meanwhile, romantic advances from Adam’s charismatic neighbour Harry begins to coax him out of his shell, nudging him onto a crossroads of his past trauma and present life.

The continued loneliness of long-lasting queer and mental health trauma is portrayed, despite increasing de-stigmatisation in our era. In fluid strokes,the film paints a life woven by equal parts love and hurt, where moving on is agonising but cathartic.

Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023)

In a surreal futuristic world, Bella Baxter lives with her unconventional father, Godwin Baxter, who shields her from the harshness that lies outside their door. Upon discovering pleasure, Bella absconds with the sweet- talking sycophant Danny Wedderburn, romping the world in a series of escalating sexcapades. Through her adventures, she confronts the farce of polite society and the unpleasantries of man, solidifying her own agency against a decaying humanity.

Poor Things features international stars Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo and is a stylistic departure for Lanthimos. A riot of humorous rebellion, the film also welcomes obscenity as a confrontation for the traditional bildungsroman.

Altitude

The Shadowless Tower (Zhang Lu, 2023)

The Shadowless Tower premiered in the main competition at the Berlinale and follows middle-aged divorcé Gu Wentong who is polite to the point of passivity. However, the poet-turned-food reviewer’s life of stasis seems to take a fresh turn when he meets his younger photographer collaborator, the effervescent Ouyang Wenhui. One day, Gu sets off to locate his estranged father, who now lives in a coastal town where Ouyang was born.

As the pair contend with the burden of their childhood pasts and negotiate their present lives while ambling through the streets of Beijing, the titular tower—a 13th- century white Tibetan Buddhist stupa—stands unchanging and stolid without ever casting a shadow. Driven by a lilting screenplay, The Shadowless Tower is a charmer that packs an entire universe in an intimate scale.

Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke HAMAGUCHI, 2023)

Dwelling in a cabin deep in the woods of the mountainous Mizubiki Village close to Tokyo, single parent Takami and his eight-year-old daughter Hana revel in a life entwined with nature. Takami’s day entails juggling odd jobs and impromptu tasks: chopping wood, collecting water from an upstream rivulet, gathering natural finds in a forest roamed by pheasants and deer. But the tranquil wilderness has its days numbered as a business announces plans to build a glamping site for city tourists, threatening to upset the ecological harmony. The company’s insincere efforts to safeguard involved parties’ interests presage vicious responses by humans and nature alike.

Youth (SPRING), (WANG Bing, 2023)

This documentary follows young textile workers in an industrial zone. They spend their days sewing fabric in windowless rooms, where one cannot tell night from day. But in these same rooms individual stories unfold. They befriend each other, fall in love, fight and break up, while relationships also become strained as they negotiate wages and bargain with employers.Youth reclaims the idea of youth in 21st-century Chinese society. While they are part of a faceless workforce producing consumer goods, they are also rebellious individuals with their own ambitions and life stories, coming together or unravelling in the sewing room. The constant hum of sewing machines becomes the soundtrack of their generation.

Afire (Christian Petzold, 2023)

In a film that bagged the Silver Bear at Berlinale, Leon retreats to a summerhouse by the Baltic coast to immerse himself in work—or so he claims. While spurning the frivolities of vacation with his friends, Leon also becomes increasingly frustrated at his unproductivity. Neither is he able to act on his attraction to the incandescent Nadja, a seasonal worker, whose type of work he disparages.

Afire plays out the conceit, insecurities and pretensions of a young artist with comedy and stunning pathos. But as the summer flits by and the miserable writer continues to seethe with dissatisfaction, forest fires raging in the distance signal an impending catastrophe that may just snap him out of his self-absorption.

Horizon

Drift (Anthony Chen, 2023)

Drift marks Anthony CHEN’s first English-language feature that premiered at Sundance.

On a paradisiacal Greek isle, Jacqueline, a penniless refugee from Liberia, roams among rich beach vacationers. She evades any overture of assistance until a resonant encounter with a gregarious American tour guide.

Unmoored but bound by bereavement and tragedy, the women begin to reach out to each other tentatively. Drift is an affecting adaptation of Alexander Maksik’s 2013 novel A Marker to Measure Drift and explores refugee displacement and its complexities with a humanist touch, upholding connection and solidarity as a salve to lives fractured by grief. As the haunted Jacqueline, Cynthia Erivo delivers a masterful portrayal of the struggle to articulate the unspeakable horrors of war and trauma.

In the Blind Spot (Ayşe POLAT, 2023)

Premiered at Berlin Encounters, directed by Ayşe Polat, a German-Kurdish filmmaker who is one of our Asian feature film competition jury members -In a Turkish village, a German film crew begins shooting a documentary on the forced disappearances of young Kurdish men. As the crew navigate the tense air, their story takes sinister turns. Meanwhile, their translator tutors a child with an uncanny vision, and whose father also feels a threat over his shoulder.

A conspiracy unfolds in three chapters, each shot with a distinct lens. The tension, far from unmasking the web of violence, lingers as doubts about our very own vision: documentary is hard to tell apart from surveillance or psychism. This precisely calculated thriller arrives at a moment where information is a unique terror, speaking to the paranoids in us—but even paranoids have enemies.

Tótem (Lila AVILÉS, 2023)

Awarded the Ecumenical Jury Prize for Best Film at the Berlinale, Tótem wears its emotions on its sleeve, infusing its immersive family drama with heartfelt documentary-style intimacy.

Seven-year-old Sol spends the day at her grandfather’s home, preparing for a birthday party for her terminally ill father, Tona, whose frail figure portends his imminent fate. While Sol waits to see him, she is left alone to navigate prickly questions about mortality, alongside simmering tensions that emerge within a family in crisis.

Against a looming sense of grief and loss, the film teems with vital signs of life, marking the celebratory farewell with the undeniable joys and hopes of being alive.

Standpoint

Rosinha and Other Wild Animals (Marta Pessoa, 2023)

Bagging the Árvore da Vida Award for Best Portuguese Film at IndieLisboa, the film Focus lands on the 1934 Portuguese Colonial Exhibition and its human zoos, highlighting disturbing images, documents and ideas that have survived. Among the colonised peoples gathered there was a Guinean woman named Rosinha, posed and photographed nude.

Rosinha’s presence and absence spark questions about the colonial, patriarchal gaze, while reconstructions and interviews take aim at ‘soft racism’ and other celebrated myths of the national imaginary that still persist.

The Mother of All Lies (Asmae El Moudir, 2023)

The Mother of All Lies won Cannes’ Golden Eye for best documentary and Best Director in Un Certain Regard.

With the use of figurines in a handmade set, the film portrays Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir helping her parents vacate her childhood home in Casablanca before she realises the depth and complexity of her family’s secrets.

Together with her parents, she builds a diorama of their old neighbourhood and gathers their relatives, using the model and figurines to provoke suppressed memories. As painful recollections rise to the surface through reenactment, Asmae starts to make sense of not only the reasons for her grandmother’s combative attitude, but also her country’s attempts to bury its violent past.

Ten Years Myanmar (Nay Wunn Ni, 2023)

Spanning sci-fi stories, slice-of-life tales, domestic dramas and humorous meta-commentary on filmmaking, this anthology features the works of five independent filmmakers from Myanmar. The speculative films envision the country’s future 10 years on, modelled after Hong Kong’s Ten Years (2015).

Collectively, the stories offer insight into the specifics of religion, politics and society in Myanmar as well as the universal experiences of romance,interpersonal relationships and the desire for a better life. Running through each narrative are recurring themes of justice and restoration—inevitable concerns for denizens of a country that has weathered socio political upheaval in recent years.

Undercurrent

24 Cinematic Points of View of A Factory Gate in China (Ho Rui An, 2023)

Directed by Ho Rui An, who was awarded the International Film Critics’ (FIPRESCI) Prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 24 Cinematic Points of View of A Factory Gate in China investigates surveillance footage of workers leaving Chinese factories from a ‘cinematic point of view’, alongside evolving depiction of workers in Euro-American and Chinese cinema spanning a century.

The Human Surge 3 (Eduardo Williams, 2023)

In Eduardo William’s second feature that won the Golden Leopard – Filmmakers of the Present at Locarno, three disparate groups of friends traverse landscapes in Peru, Sri Lanka and Taiwan, eventually converging on a mysterious mountaintop. Their multilingual conversations reveal their routines, fears and desires, and reflect their fragmented yet connected existences in a contemporary global age. The landscapes they move in convey a strong sense of place, but become more indecipherable as the characters cross into each other’s spaces.

Filmed with a panoramic 360° camera fitted with eight lenses, Williams edited the footage to fit a regular screen in 2D. The camera angles, glitches, vertiginous distortions and contextual wide views create a cinematic experience that rewards the careful viewer with quietly astonishing moments.

Here (Bas Devos, 2023)

Presented with the Best Film in the Encounters competition and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Berlinale, in suburban Brussels, Stefan, an unassuming Romanian construction worker, prepares to depart for home. He clears out his fridge and cooks up a pot of soulful borscht, passing it on to fellow kindred spirits, sowing love one bowl at a time. A serendipitous chance encounter with bryologist Shuxiu blossoms into a friendship as she opens his eyes to the once-invisible growth of mosses that thrive in the city’s crevices.

Elegantly shot on 16mm, Here touches on a deep human desire for connection in a world of interminable transience and movement. Beneath the shine of Europe, the film offers a glimpse into the ennui and troubling dreams that hum in the background of its characters’ daily existence.

Landmark

Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla TARR, 2000)

A critically acclaimed film that won the Berlin International Film Festival (2001) – Winner of the reader Jury of the “Berliner Zeitung”,a strange circus arrives in a small Hungarian town, with a preserved dead whale and an enigmatic entity known as ‘The Prince’ as its star attractions. While timid newspaper delivery man János is drawn to this spectacle, the circus begins to have an incendiary effect on the rest of the townsfolk, unleashing a slow-burning psychological contagion that escalates into mass hysteria.

An apocalyptic parable of society collapsing under the weight of history and faceless demagogues, Werckmeister Harmonies is adapted from László Krasznahorkai’s 1989 novel, The Melancholy of Resistance. Composed of 39 languid black-and-white shots, the film’s formal rigour and affective intensity unfurl like viscous paint on an expansive canvas. A cult-favourite.

Ishanou (Aribam Syam Sharma, 1991)

Screened in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section in 1991, and the 4th SGIFF’s Asian Feature Film Competition, the film follows a woman journeying into priesthood in the northeastern Indian state of Manipur. Tampha lives a peaceful existence in the countryside with her family but after experiencing transcendental interventions, Tampha inexorably takes the path of divinity — becoming a Maibi, a female priestess of the Sanamahi faith — from which she cannot return.

The first Manipuri film to be restored, Ishanou is but one example from a region whose cinema remains largely unknown both domestically and internationally. Featuring traditional rituals, dance and music, Ishanou is a cultural document of the unique specificities of a place and its peoples — defying the unified nation-state narrative of the richly plural Indian subcontinent.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (David Lynch, 1992)

A cult classic of a psychological horror and surrealist work that reveals the week leading up to the murder of a hedonistic Laura Palmer, a popular homecoming queen who belongs to a respected family of the suburban town of Twin Peaks. Yet, their respectability and propriety are threatened when long-held secrets unravel the Palmers’ seemingly idyllic lives, while the carefully constructed facade gives way to the influence of crime, drugs and sex.

With its distinctive brand of surrealism, melodrama and eccentricity, Twin Peaks has enjoyed a cult following since its release in the 1990s. Fire Walk With Me, its prequel, is an exploration of the mundanity and pervasiveness of evil, delving into the darkest corners of the human psyche in a singular, haunting and unforgettable experience.

Domain

Domain: Not Housed

In Singapore’s experimental film scene that is constantly negotiating its position in relation to dominant modes of production, Not Housed examines how the afterlife of filmic experiments — whether remembered or forgotten — is contingent on the manifold ways film practitioners use different contexts and spaces. By facilitating an open archive through physical and digital interventions, this programme serves as a platform for the critical homeless.

The archive aims to consolidate and connect the different aspects of cultural production relating to experimental film—such as education, filmic works, practitioners, screening venues and festivals—housing the data in an interactive 3D visual archive that is publicly accessible and continually updated.