Nugroho's 'A Poet' to compete for 11th silver screen award
Nugroho's 'A Poet' to compete for 11th silver screen award
By Mehru Jaffer
SINGAPORE (JP): The participation of Indonesia's Garin Nugroho
in the 14th Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF), where
more than 300 films from all corners of the world will twinkle on
screens around the city state for more than a fortnight, is
significant for several reasons.
A Poet, Nugroho's black-and-white film with a modest budget
but made in a style that is lyrical to say the least will compete
for the 11th silver screen awards together with 14 other films,
including China's Beijing Bicycle and Taiwan's Betelnut Beauty.
Beijing Bicycle won the Silver Bear, the second-highest award at
the last Berlin International Film Festival and Betelnut Beauty's
Lin Cheng-Sheng the best-director award at the same festival.
Although there is plenty of fare from around the world with
Australia in focus, images from Canadian, German focus, French
panorama, British cinema, independently made films from the
U.S., along with those from Austria, Greece and Iceland, the
highlight of the festival remains the menu chosen from Asia.
It is SIFF's philosophy to give due prominence to cinema from
Asia that makes it only to the fringe of international film
festivals held in Western countries.
The trend is, of course, changing but slowly.
Taiwanese Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a case
in point that was nominated for 10 Oscars but when it came to
giving away the best-picture award, Hollywood chose to reward
Gladiator, a Roman epic, instead.
Together with mainstream cinema from Asia as well as abroad,
SIFF will pay equal attention to low-cost and short films, as
well as documentaries. The fringe program lists as many as 12
short films from Indonesia, some eight minutes in length and
others barely five minutes.
Along with Riri Riza, director of Sherina's Adventures,
Nugroho will also participate in a seminar titled, The Truth is
Out There. Nugroho will share his views with German director
Harun Farocki, Australian Dennis O'Rourkee and Thailand's Sophie
Barry on: What do documentary filmmakers get from documentaries
which they can't get from the mass media?
Sponsored by the Asia Europe Foundation, Riza will be on the
same podium as Britain's Jano Williams and Malaysia's Alan D'Cruz
to talk about the different cultural barriers that Asian and
European documentarists have to deal with, with respect to
funding, finding an audience and subject?
"This film festival is a bold one. While other festivals
around the world are programming accessible and mass-oriented
fare to attract audiences, SIFF will focus on documentaries this
year," says Kelvin Tong, film critic of Singapore's daily
newspaper The Straits Times.
Kelvin told The Jakarta Post that this is enough proof that
SIFF is serious about providing a platform to nonmass cinema as
well. As someone who is familiar with most film festivals around
the world, like Berlin, Venice and Cannes, Kelvin feels that SIFF
definitely has an edge when it comes to Asian films.
Both the seminar and the screening of small budget films is,
therefore, important to record the multiple problems faced by
filmmakers in Asia, from funding to censorship. For viewers would
certainly like filmmakers of Nugoroho's caliber to document many
more aspects of life on the screen for them than he is able to do
at present, probably due to a lack of funds.
Nugroho's, A Poet, is a 83-minute long, black-and-white film
about Ibrahim Kadir, a didong poet, in the tradition of oral
poets of Gayo in the troubled province of Aceh. Kadir is
imprisoned without trial in 1965 and witnesses the massacre of
hundreds of people by the military, for being communists. After
his release from prison Kadir weaves his dreadful experience into
poetry which becomes the only chronicle of the brutalities hushed
up under censorship that lasted for more than three decades here.
The beauty of the simple film lies in its poetic treatment of
the ugly face of politics.
This year's SIFF has an exciting list of cinema not just from
Indonesia but from Iran and India, the largest producer of films
on this continent. From Sri Lanka there is Asoka Handagam's This
is my Moon, a poignant story of his war-ravaged island. Iran
brings The Circle by Jafar Panahi, the director of The White
Balloon, to SIFF. Winner of the Golden Lion at the last Venice
Film Festival, not everyone is pleased with The Circle, that
concentrates on the oppressive lives led by women in Iran.
"The movie is made by a man, evidently seeking Hollywood
success," says Homa Hoodfar, professor of anthropology at
Montreal's Concordia University and founding member of women
living under Muslim law, an organization which campaigns on
Muslim women's rights issues.
"Women in Iran still have a long way to go but they have the
strength and courage to do it, something conspicuously absent
from a movie like The Circle".
Maybe it is the very controversy that engulfs films made by
Iranians that arouses much curiosity about them. In The Day I
Became a Woman, Marziyeh Meshkinin continues to film the sad
state of affairs of the women of her country.
Although Indian films do not compete for an award, there are
three films screened in the Asian Panorama section. Pathos is
about the plight of the elderly, Sandstorm about a defiant woman
from the desert area and The Wrestlers is an allegory that urges
greater religious tolerance.
Yi-Yi (A one and a two), from Taiwan will open the film
festival on April 11. Directed by Edward Yang the film takes its
title from the start of a jazz improvisation and like the free-
flowing structure of jazz, its foreplay meanders rhythmically
before reaching a thunderous climax. A winner of Los Angeles Film
Critics Association and New York Film Critics Circle awards for
best foreign film plus the best film of the year from the
National Society of Film Critics, Yi-Yi's screening on opening
night is understandably sold out.
Aoyama Shinji's, Eureka, from Japan, will close the festival
on April 28. The driver and a young brother and sister are the
only survivors after their bus is hijacked on a hot summer day.
To find out what happens next in the sepia-toned, black-and-white
movie, is a fairly good reason to be at this year's SIFF.