'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.