'The Poet' wins 2 awards at S'pore festival

'The Poet' wins 2 awards at S'pore festival

By Mehru Jaffer

JAKARTA (JP): Ibrahim Kadir's powerful performance as The
Poet, set during the bloody aftermath of the 1965 coup attempt in
Indonesia, has won him the prestigious Silver Screen Award for
best actor at the 14th Singapore International Film Festival
(SIFF) that ends on Saturday.

A poet, Kadir was one of the thousands of people who were
accused of being communists and unlawfully detained after the
coup attempt. He spent 22 days in prison.

The film tells how he dealt with the trauma of his detention
and the witnessing of executions by putting these experiences
into beautiful ballads in the tradition of a didong (singing
poet) from the central highlands of his native Aceh.

The film's director, Garin Nugroho, was also honored with an
award for best film from the Network for the Promotion of Asian
Cinema (Netpac). Garin recreated the Acehnese prison cell setting
in a Jakarta studio.

Singaporean filmmaker Nazir Husain Keshvani said The Poet
succeeded in part because of Garin's brilliant camera work.

"Restricting the location to a prison cell and pacing the film
with long, boring shots appears to be a choice intended to make
the film a sort of installation space for the release of the
nation's collective trauma," Keshvani said.

Many have praised the film for its lack of malice in tackling
the subject. During its 70 minutes, massacres and other
atrocities are evoked through traditional singing, with people
sitting in a circle thumping on pillows and clapping their hands
to express their suffering.

The only other film to win two awards at the festival is
director Asoka Handagama's This Is My Moon, which bagged a young
cinema award as well as a special mention by Netpac. The film is
about jealousy, betrayal, hatred and lust in a remote village in
Sri Lanka, the emerald island that is losing much of its glitter
due to the ongoing civil war.

The best film award went to Shinji Aoyama's Japanese film
Eureka and the Special Jury Award to Turkey's Clouds of May.
Korean director Chunhyang won the festival's best director award
for Im Kwon Taek and Vietnam received the best actress award for
Nguyen Lan Huong in The House of Guavas.

SIFF was started 14 years ago by film buffs and over the
years it has established a formidable reputation for showcasing
Asian cinema. This year some 350 films were shown from around the
world but about 40 percent of the program was devoted to Asian
films, with particular focus on the genre of documentary.

To encourage excellence among Asian filmmakers, the
festival introduced the Silver Screen Awards in 1991.

Aruna Vasudev, editor of Cinemaya, the official
journal of Netpac, said the Oscars, the traditional focus of
cinematic awards, were merely a lot of hype by the media.

"What SIFF is doing for Asian cinema is amazing and the media
has to take note of that," she told The Jakarta Post, adding that
The Poet, even without an Oscar nod, remains an exceptional
cinematic experience.