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.

Beijing Sounds

No matter how good my Mandarin is, I know that the Beijing-er can always tell that I am an outsider (外地人）from my accent.

I spent the best part of 2007, living out of a suitcase in Beijing, working on a documentary about the Beijing Olympics.

For someone from a small country like Singapore, Beijing is a sprawling city and I find that I spent a lot of time in a cab, trying to get from one end of the city to another.

Three minutes into my cab ride, The same question always comes up, “小姐，你是哪里人？”　Miss, where are you from?” The subtext is of course, “You do not sound like one of us.”

In the process of making the film, I have come to a better appreciation of the Beijing accent and the Beijing dialect. While I was working on the sound-mix of my documentary, my Beijing born-and-bred sound engineers will cackle at phrases in my film while the nuances are completely lost on me.

It is great fun therefore to read this blog post, explaining what does the Beijing “R” sound mean?

Beijing Sounds – 北京的声儿 (link via Danwei)

My Beijing friends tell me that figuring out whether to end a word or phrase with the “R” sound, or “儿“声，is an art unto itself. I am sure an entire encyclopedia can be written on the “dos” and “don’ts”.

The outsider often betrays their very foreigness by trying too hard, ending each and every phrase with the “R” sound. As a result, they make a laughing stock of themselves.

What comes intuitively to the native Beijing-er may take a life-time of puzzling out for an outsider or 外地人like me.

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Ming Pao Monthly and Chinese Intellectual Tradition

I have been amazed by how much my reading habits have changed over the past two years.

I no longer read hard copies of daily newspapers and magazines on a regular basis.

Instead I subscribe to news feeds using the Google Reader. I scan through hundreds of articles electronically on a daily basis to imbibe the latest trends of our Web 2.0 era.

But I was recently reminded of the pleasures of reading a hard copy of a magazine when I bought a copy of Ming Pao Monthly in Hong Kong.

Yes, I could read some of the articles online for free at the Ming Pao Monthly website but there is something about reading a literary and scholarly magazine slowly, on the train, in the hotel room, while waiting for a friend at a cafe…

The key word is “slowly.” Because pondering on the dilemmas of our times takes time and attention, both rare commodities these days.

Only then, will the pleasures of the essay on the encounter between ailing Chinese scholar Ji Xianlin (季羡林） and famous actress Lin Ching Hsia（林青霞） come to life on paper. So will the weight of the burden of China’s environmental crisis be truly felt.

Perusing the pages of Ming Pao Monthly, I am reminded anew of the responsibilities of the Chinese intellectual. They have to bear the burdens and sorrows of our times before everyone else. 先天下之忧而忧，后天下之乐而乐。

And that certainly takes time,attention and heart.

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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!

TV 2.0 Content in a Micro-audience World

I love this term that has been coined to describe the future of multimedia content — “micro-audience” world.

TV 2.0 — a micro audience world? « Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger

It succinctly describes the immense opportunity and the intractable difficulties confronting content creators.

A micro-audience world implies that anyone can create their own media platform, using a combination of tools that are widely accessible– YouTube, Flickr, blogging and the web.

But it might also mean that the audience base for each segment is so small that the content creators cannot profit from it.

How will the economics of the “micro-audience world” differ from that of traditional media?

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NBCC’s Best Recommended

In an era where even TV is becoming passe, I find it real cool that the National Book Critics Circle has its own blog.

http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com

The web seems to be a perfect means to spread the word about a good book.

Now the NBCC blog is asking award-winning novelists, historians, poets, critics and biographer to vote for their favourite books every month.

Find out what books these distinguished individuals have really loved in 2007:

CRITICAL MASS: Introducing the NBCC’s Best Recommended

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