Singapore International Film Festival screenings

For many years, I have attended the Singapore International Film Festival as a movie-goer. This year, for the first time, I will be attending the festival as a filmmaker.

My documentary about the Beijing Olympics, Boomtown Beijing, will be screening at in the Singapore Panorama section on Wed April 9th at 9:15pm and Sat April 12th at 2pm. Tickets can be purchased here.

Boomtown Beijing is only one of more than a dozen films in the Singapore Panorama showcase this year, which includes a broad range of works made by Singapore filmmakers..

Please support SIFF, one of the oldest film festivals in Asia and arguably, also one of the most rigorously curated.

Oscar Nominations and The Alchemy of Resonance

The best films often don’t win the biggest awards.

This is the conclusion that I have come to after observing film competitions and award ceremonies on the sidelines.

I have seen very average films make it to the top film festivals in the world. On the other hand, highly nuanced and well produced pieces have been left out on the cold, hard pavement of rejection.

The key to this puzzle lies in that intangible and elusive variable we sometimes call “resonance”

Oscar-nominated documentaries send message of hope – Yahoo! News

News about this year’s Oscar nominations seem to confirm this educated guess. 4 out of 15 films that made it to the shortlist for documentary features deal with the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of these, 3 out of the 4 war films, No End in Sight, Taxi to the Dark Side,Operation Homecoming, scored Oscar nominations.

We all know that the war in Iraq and Afghanistan are millstones tied to the neck of the American conscience. So documentary film making,too,becomes a means of exorcising the ghosts of blood, violence and the tears of innocent victims. The war theme resonates with the American zeitgeist.

In other words, if you are making a personal film about a little known cause in an obscure place with a polysyllabic name that defies pronunciation, your chances of clinching an Oscar nomination and winning a big award are close to zero. No matter how well-made your film may be.

This is because your film will not find resonance with your intended audience. The jury panel and the film festival goers may be frustrated because they search, could not find, those reflections of their greatest sorrows and deepest anxieties in your work of art.

In that sense, the ability to read the times and have your finger on the pulse of your audience is just as important as the technical skills involved in crafting a good film.

Having said that, it is perhaps wise to go ahead and make that obscure little film anyway.

The making of the film that is after your heart is reward in itself, even without the coveted laurels of nominations and awards.
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Berlin Film Festival Adventures

I will be attending the Berlin Film Festival 2008 (7th — 17th February 2008) There are two big reasons why I am going.

Invisible City, a film I worked on, is screening in the Forum section of the Berlinale.

I will also take the opportunity to market and promote my own film about the Beijing Olympics, Boomtown Beijing at the Festival and the European Film Market.

With thousands of journalists and film makers attending, I am sure Berlin will be a zoo. But hopefully, it’d also be a lot of fun.

Wish me luck!

My First Film Festival Poster

I recently presented my documentary about the Beijing Olympics at the Guangzhou International Documentary Festival.

Boomtown Beijing is my first independent film and making the festival poster for it was a big thrill. Mainly because of how last minute it all was. I got them printed the day I arrived in Guangzhou at a little print shop near the

Sun Yat-Sen University.

A big thank you to Carrie Dee Cao Zhen Zhen, a graduate student at SYSU who helped me pull it together. She also coordinated and publicized my guest lectures at the university.

Talk about useful local knowledge!