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.