Youth Critics Writing

Browse the following reviews and essays written by our youth critics who participated in the SGIFF Youth Critics Programme (YCP).

 

The Youth Critics Programme allows emerging voices in film criticism to share fresh perspectives on the Festival’s lineup. Their contributions, rich with personal anecdotes and analytical depth, underscore the enduring value of thoughtful, long-form criticism.

ATLAS

ATLAS VOL 2 : The Official Youth Critics Programme Publication.

Read Atlas Volume 2, featuring ten spirited young writers from Singapore who have lent their voices to the Festival’s lineup in 2023.

FESTIVAL

Everything Comes Full Circle in Monisme

The Soft In-betweens of Asian Masculinity in Tomorrow Is A Long Time

Labyrinthine Longings in Dreaming & Dying

The Sound of Sorrow in Nicole Midori Woodford’s Last Shadow At First Light

The Salvation of a Spanning/Spinning City: Drugs as Messiah in Critical Zone

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell : An uncomfortable exercise in metamorphosis?

Speaking Imperfectly without Fear in Snow in Midsummer

Hesitation Wound : Messy Moralities in Meditative Jury Drama

Morrison : A magical, conflicted examination of Thailand’s washed-out history with the US military

Call Me By My Name: A Reclamation of Name and Identity in Valli

Contemplating the Inevitability of Death and Loss in A Journey in Spring

Through the Looking Glass: The Tenants’ Surrealist & Phantasmagorical Vision of the South Korean Economic Crisis

ATLAS

Volume 1 – Published: April 2023

FESTIVAL

Polyvocality as Resistance

ISSUE 1

Trees Remember What Men Leave Behind: A Review of ‘The Men Who Wait’ by Trương Minh Quý

‘Distance’: A Perilous Road to Reconciliation

Review of ‘New Abnormal’ – Structural Violence in Pandemic Era Thailand

A glimpse of the pandemic: ‘The New Faces (of Dreams and Mysteries)’

ISSUE 2

Among A Thousand Weddings & A Million Funerals ‘Side By Side’

Longing, in Tandem with the Mind and Body in ‘You are 56, Still Counting and Keep Counting; I am 25’

Decoding Silence in ‘Nothing in the Cries of Cicadas <一抔黄土>’

A Modern Push; An Inevitable Traditional Pull is ‘Posterity’

ISSUE 3

Stones, Schoolbuses and the Speculative: Ecofuturist narratives in Natasha Tontey’s ‘Wa’anak Witu Watu’

Review of ‘{if your bait can sing, the wild one will come} Like Shadows Through Leaves’: So Sing Your Song of Re-Enchantment, So See but at an Angle

‘Blinded By The Light’ Film Review: The Reluctant Artist Pays a Tortured Homage to His Art

Idle Worship: ‘Grandma’s Broken Leg’ by Huynh Công Nhớ

Portraits Of Faces On A Screen In ‘Himala: A Dialectic Of Our Times’

ISSUE 4

We are the children of Southeast Asia

The Center Cannot Hold: Filmmaking Against Anthropocentrism, Against Empire

Untethering the Past: Radical Applications of the Archive

UNRULY FORM

ISSUE 5

Till Death Do Us Not Part: The Persistence of the Departed in SGIFF 2021

Buddhism in Southeast Asian Film

All That Remains is… ruin

Affectless Cinema

ISSUE 6

Displacement and Sense of Belonging in Film: An SGIFF Exploration

Here, at the Fraying Edge: On Marginality

What Awaits on the Other Side : Migration and Displacement in Society

The banes and banes of being a woman in Southeast Asia

ISSUE 1

Keeping Time in Tellurian Drama

Upstream, Downstream, Past and Present

The Invisible People

Who is that animated doodle figure I see?

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Uniformity

Constructing Home: Bình by Ostin Fam

‘Like surrendering to a current’: On Pham Ngoc Lân’s The Unseen River

The Delicate Frames Of Grief

Search for your voice, against the trembling wall

Coffee at Arm’s Length

ISSUE 2

Working | Relaxing

The Afterlives of Calamity

Without a body, what’s there to love?

‘We were at a wedding’: On Kin Wai Yam’s Pulang

The loss of innocence

In honour of darkness, silence, and nothingness: Lin Htet Aung’s Estate

ISSUE 3

Finding Home, Building Home

The Mountain & The Document

Holding Hands and Laughing Atop Eggshells

Forms of Loss

Fragments of time and space

From an Alien’s Eye: A Literature Review of Humanity in 17 Visual Artefacts

ISSUE4

The Pangs of Life

Par for the Course: To Be Asleep to That Which Rots You

A Modern Love, A Modern Death

Notes on the Afterlife

Sidestepping Skipping Through a Chaotic World

ISSUE 5

“Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside”: On Youth

Let Us Put Ourselves to Rest: SGIFF 2020 and Explorations in Repair

The Relentless Modern Routine & The Constant Want For More

Southeast Asian Short Film Competition: On Dreams

“If the government says it’s a hoax, then it’s a hoax!”

FESTIVAL

For aspiring filmmakers: What comes next after your first film?

Takashi Miike Masterclass Recap

ISSUE 1

Southeast Asian Short Film Competition Programme 4: How to Belong

Kindred Spirits: The Youth Jury & Critics Programme

Southeast Asian Short Film Competition Programme 1: The Wild and the Wacky

Southeast Asian Short Film Competition Programme 2: Spaces of Life

Southeast Asian Short Film Competition Programme 3: What We Are Forced To Be

ISSUE 2

Against the Grain: Estrangement and Belonging in I’m Not Your F***ing Stereotype

Gallery: Is an Immersive Experience Necessarily a Good One?

Still Life on Film; Pham Thien An’s Stay Awake, Be Ready

Subverting Culture Without Tokenism: The Significance of Meat

ISSUE 3

A Cinema of Revolt

Sweet, Salty’s Bittersweet: A Free Write

The Case for Slow Cinema

This is Acting: Performance in Life and Performance in Art

What the Absurd Invites

ISSUE 4

Architecture of the Toilet

Experimentations with Filmic Reality

The Consequences of Intimacy

The Meta Age

The Mechanics of Taste: What Food Brings to the Table

Tradition in the 21st Century: Navigating the Southeast Asian Female Experience

Visual Density in Diary of Cattle

Festival

Dialogue with the Living and the Dead: Rithy Panh’s Masterclass

Getting Her Mantou: Joan Chen Looks Back on Her Career

Issue 1

What Dreams Are Made Of

An Ode to Lady M

Programme 3: Strictly for those with an identity crisis, so basically everyone

Something we lost and why it matters to Programme 1 of the Southeast Asian Short Film Competition

The Political, The Personal & The Ugly Truth

Issue 3

What filmmakers have to consider (and feel) when exploring representation and identity in film

Issue 4

‘Mad Prophet’ of Luzon Uncovers a Nuclear Waste Barrel in Disputed Seas

So Close, Yet so Far

Issue 5

Brillante and Raymund: Keeping it Real

Reclaiming the Personal

Festival

SGIFF 2017 On the Ground • Closing Weekend (December 1-3)

Issue 1

From Gosford to Downton, Learning from Lord Julian Fellowes

Tales of Strangers

Issue 2

Locating Human Experiences in Film: Consideration of Space

A Vast Edifice of Memories: Film as a Medium to Record History

SGIFF 2017 ON THE GROUND • Opening Weekend Recap (November 23-26)

Jodilerks Dela Cruz, Employee of the Month: Interview with Carlo Francisco Manatad

Issue 3

The Aesthetics of Growing Up – Puppy Love

Issue 4

SGIFF 2017 On the Ground • Days 5 to 8 (November 27-30)

Issue 5

Video, Masculinity and Power: Joko and Suerte

Embracing Love: An Interview Piece with Ivan Tan

Then and Now: Face Time with Filmmakers

Festival

28 Nov-4 Dec 2016 – SGIFF On The Ground Wrap Up

Issue 1

Gladys Ng (The Pursuit Of A Happy Human Life) – From The Director’s Chair

Abdul Nizam – A Special Feature for From The Director’s Chair

Issue 2

Spaces of Separation: SEA Short Film Programme 2

Introducing the Southeast Asian Short Films: Into a Different Asia

24 Nov 2016 – SGIFF On The Ground

Animation All Grown Up: Estonia’s Brand of Independent Animation

Issue 3

Interview with Che Tagyamon, Director of Lola Loleng

Of Labels and Truth

Issue 4

Kinship: Recapturing SEA

Freeze: The Disquieting Miscibility of Love and Hate

The Misunderstood – Signified or the Signifier?

Of Myth and Money

Issue 5

Lost in Another City

The Weight of a Place

Indonesia: My Special Place

Speed Dates in the Cinema

Festival

Chew on This! The Youth Jury Meets the Filmmakers

Issue 1

A Different Cinema: Introducing SEA Short Films and the Youth Jury

This is Home…Truly?: SEA Short Film Programme 3

Issue 2

Interview with Nguyen Phuong Anh, Filmmaker of As I Lay Dying

Getting to Know Our Southeast Asian Short Film Directors

Issue 4

The Curious Case of Disappearing Women

Issue 5

Why Southeast Asia?

Boats and Narratives: Afloat, Adrift, Astray?

Shred of Life – My Father After Dinner ???

Issue 1

What They Talk About When They Talk About Programming

Issue 2

This is Home, Surely?

329: Remembering the 1976 massacre

A spiritual coming-of-age

Issue 3

Finding Love; Lost

Issue 4

Every Love Story… Is A Ghost Story?