Apichatpon set to steal the show in S'pore
SINGAPORE (JP): Few may know him, but 30-year-old Apichatpon Weerasethakul is one of the most interesting filmmakers to emerge out of Thailand in recent times.
The architect turned filmmaker incorporates cinema theory and philosophy into his design elements, and his works range from painting, photography to holography.
Film making is now a full-time career, and for the past decade he has been trying to transfer moods and ambience, rather than plot, onto the screen. His conceptual documentary, Mysterious Object at Noon, is listed among the best films of last year by Film Comment magazine.
The 85-minute-long film inspired by Exquisite Corpse Game, the surrealist western game, is filmed in an Asian style and shot in 16 mm. Funds later helped to blow up the film into a 35 mm.
It will be screened on April 22 as part of the Asian Panorama. In a retrospective, it is possible to see eight of his other films on April 16, including Bullet,
Apichatpon's first film, is a silent black and white experimental celluloid strip, upon which he discovers the beauty of light and time.
Also five minutes in length is 0016643225059, another experimental short that gently reflects the director's emotions when he talks to his mother on the phone after a long absence from home.
The longest film in the retrospective is the 27-minute Malee and the Boy that documents one day in the life of an 11-year-old boy who wanders around Bangkok gathering sound bytes of the city.
The tribute to Mario O'Hara, a 55-year-old Filipino Thespian, on April 21 and April 22 is also something to look forward to. The brilliant all-round artiste, who was born to an Irish-American father, started his career in acting on the radio. Over the years Mario has acted, directed and written scripts for films that are said to be the best in Filipino cinema.
The Singapore International Film Festival makes it possible to get a glimpse of Mario's versatile performance as a director in his latest film Demons Aka Hope of the Heart. Filmed last year in the Negros, it shows the island-province bubbling and boiling with social unrest a few months after the assassination of Ninoy Acquino in 1983. It remains his most confrontational film to date.
Flowers of the City Jail from 1985 is a telling commentary on the justice system in his country. Mario shines as a screenwriter in Insiang where the notorious "Smokey Mountain" garbage heap, becomes the symbol of the country's economic downturn.
Directed by Lino Brocka, another darling of Filipino cinema during its golden period in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, the film was completed in a little over two weeks and marked Brocka's debut at the prestigious Cannes film festival.
You Were Weighed and Found Wanting was a critical and commercial success when it was first released in 1974. It remains a landmark in Filipino cinema.
Apart from writing the script, Mario, the one with the greenish-blue eyes, also gives a brilliant performance as Berto, the town leper in the same film. (Mehru Jaffer)