Asian filmmakers say long arm of the censor still a problem
By Mehru Jaffer
SINGAPORE (JP): Edward Yang sat on the 60th floor of Singapore's Westin Stamford hotel, with the entire city-state literally at his feet.
The 53-year-old film director arrived here with a twinkle in his eye, and Yi Yi (A One And A Two), his latest film to flag off the 14th Singapore Film Festival (SIFF). And he received a standing ovation for it.
Despite the fact that Yi Yi has won numerous awards for Yang, including best director at the Cannes Film Festival and the New York Film Circle award for best foreign language film, it has yet to be released in his native Taiwan.
He does not believe it is due to censorship (the film tells of the lives of five members of a Taipei family), which has long been the bane of Asian filmmakers.
"I am told that the film is too expensive for buyers in that country," explained the very unassuming looking Yang, dressed in khakis and a white polo shirt.
Talking to The Jakarta Post in between the screening of 350 films at the three-week-long festival that concludes on April 28, Yang added that he did not think too much about a film after it was made. He is already toying with his next theme that could end up being a lavish, period film. In his opinion there is much that one can learn from the past, but his films so far have concentrated on documenting the contradictions of contemporary Taiwan.
Yang belongs to that group of Taiwan intellectuals who decided in the early 1980s to move on from escapist entertainment to introspect and look directly at the reality around them.
Director of at least six films since 1983, Yang said that financially it made more sense to him to look at contemporary themes and to shoot against a background that already exists, like the modern day apartment of Yi Yi.
And as more and more filmmakers find themselves working within a global network, they seem less inclined to pay attention to threats imposed by national censorship boards.
It does not bother Yang much if one corner of the globe does not approve of his film as he feels that there are enough people in other parts of the world who are interested in listening to the way he tells stories on screen. That, he considers is a fair enough situation in the kind of global village we live in today.
From India, the largest democracy in the world where cinema is often butchered not just by the censor but also by offended members of society, comes Jayaraj with Pathos, also shown at the festival. Jayaraj has had problems of his own in the past when the cinema where an earlier film was showing was attacked by a mob and the screen set on fire.
That has not stopped the award-winning director and producer from making socially relevant films like Pathos, a tale about elderly people who are increasingly being abandoned in old age by their children. His last film is Peace and tackles the rising number of political murders.
Jayaraj calls censorship a chain around any act of creativity. He feels it comes in different shapes and forms -- and often from unexpected sources.
Even if censorship laws are lenient in a country, people often take it upon themselves to play the pious role of custodians of morality and social etiquette.
Jayaraj believes in doing his job discreetly, far from the intruding eyes of the media. He likes to keep a low profile while making a film. He is now working on a film on child labor which is yet another tinder-box of an issue, both within and outside of India.
Brave
Another brave participant at SIFF, Barbara Hammer, is an internationally recognized independent filmmaker who has made close to 80 films in a 30-year career.
A lesbian artist, she dealt with the history of homosexuality in Nitrate Kisses (1992). In Tender Fictions (1995) she explores her own discovery of herself and her sexuality. Her films have outraged some; clips from Nitrate Kisses were sent to members of the U.S. Congress by a conservative group to try and stop financial support for Hammers's work.
However, Congress voted to continue the funding through the National Endowment for the Arts.
Ashok Soman, senior web writer for the online magazine Octopus, said at the festival that formal censorship in countries does not always come in the way of good work.
Soman gave the example of Iran that has consistently produced great films throughout its postwar history. The Day I Became a Woman by Marziyeh Meshkini and The Circle by Jafar Panahi are both competing at the SIFF for the prestigious silver screen award to be announced on April 27.
The greatest surprise is Malaysia's Buka Api (Open Fire) that saw its world premier here. Even with so much talk of religious and social conservatism in the country, youthful director Osman Ali succeeded in celebrating on screen the right to be able to choose one's sexuality and lifestyle. In the story about the life of sex workers and members of the transsexual community of the Chow Kit red-light district of Kuala Lumpur, religion is all pervading.
Producer Julian Jayaseelan is delighted by the film's glowing reception. He told the Post that the film was originally intended to be a 20-minute educational film for sex workers.
"But Osman Ali turned it into an amazing dramatized documentary, made on a shoestring budget of RM 30,000 on digital beta in 12 days, which I wish the whole world will see," said Julian who cannot get over his recent graduation from being a member of a non-governmental organization working with drug users, sex workers, transsexuals, homosexuals and people living with HIV/AIDS, to a film producer.
Aruna Vasudev, editor of the Asian film quarterly Cinemaya, said that she has no time for censorship of any sort. Mobs who barge into movie houses and disrupt the screening of films that have been cleared by the censor board in the first place, disgust her.
"These are antisocial elements and should be taken to task by law enforcing authorities," she insisted.
Vasudev is annoyed by the recent banning of two digital movies in India by Pankaj Advani and Siddharth Srinivasan respectively.
She hopes for the day when the censorship body will have people on its board who are capable of looking beyond the sexuality and profane language obvious on the screen to the profundity in films made by young and talented directors like Advani and Srinivasan.
Will that be the day when nirvana will dawn upon cinema, or the day of doom when it will have lost all the tension on which it has thrived for all these decades?