Programmed by the Singapore International Film Festival, the latest project from Sri Lankan director Lalith Rathnayake isn’t a comedy. It’s a drama invested in the commonalities between two “vocations” at different ends of the spectrum of morality. The vehicle for that idea is a screenplay (co-written by the director) in which a literal vehicle ferries three state workers and a criminal. In other words, this is a meditative project that puts cops and a robber on a road trip.

The resulting trip is anything but straightforward. These men all have lives elsewhere, and over the course of the journey, those lives interfere with their speed—and maybe even resolve. The most senior of the officers (Shyam Fernando) has taken a lover and uses the opportunity of the trip to drop off a gift. The least-ranked officer receives a call informing him of his wife’s ill health, sparking concerns about his low wages. The designated driver, Udayasiri (Mahendra Perera), is a fan of a trivia show on radio. The men take turns at the wheel and also at guarding Nanditha, who is handcuffed and stowed at the back of the vehicle.

On occasion, the film’s attempts to raise its own temperature through cuts to the cuffs on the criminal’s hands, feinting — as though Nanditha may show himself to be an action hero capable of the kind of freedom-engineering violence common to that genre. It’s no spoiler to say that Rathnayake, here, isn’t that kind of filmmaker. His sympathy does seem to me mostly with Nanditha but he has chosen a rather literary manner to convey that sympathy. (More on this in a bit.) In fact, the entire film has a literary texture—as if Rathnayake had adapted a short story, or wrote one and then reworked it in Final Draft. (This isn’t bad.)

Sometimes, the film’s characters speak in a manner that suggests bookishness, none more so than Nanditha. He gives four reasons as to why their destination (the film’s title) is named as it is. He has enough knowledge to supply correct answers to the trivia questions concerning celestial bodies, and towards the end, drops a line that mixes poetry and astronomy.

In short, a significant part of the film is spent humanising Nanditha, and by not showing or giving us an account of his crimes, Rathnayake puts his thumb on the scale. The criminal is nothing but honourable, even as he’s close to death, while the head of the police officers transporting him is in an extramarital affair with a young woman who accuses him of stinginess. And when one of the main actions of the criminal is revealed to be almost righteous, it comes to seem as though Nanditha might be the Christ. Is he, though? That’s a reading that may be plausible but it is not a reading that the film justifies, given the absence of back story. So that, whatever the intentions may be, that bit comes off as more sentimental than metaphorical.

Nevertheless, Riverstone will enjoy even more festival showings across Asia than it has already had, and it would be interesting to see it elsewhere after its festival run. It is a great-looking project, as it goes from aerial shots of a pretty pastoral landscape to the film’s impressively-filmed climactic moment in which two men talk and talk, sometimes in terse poetic terms but always illuminated, only by their vehicle headlights.

Director: Lalith Rathnayake
Writer: Lalith Rathnayake, Nilantha Perera
Cast: Shyam Fernando, Randika Gunathilaka, Priyantha Sirikumara, Mahendra Perera
Cinematographer: Prabath Roshan
Editor: Thissa Surendra
Producers: Prabath Roshan, Nimathi Porage
Venue: Singapore International Film Festival (Asian Feature Film Competition)
In Sinhala
119 minutes

This will probably be what Dream of the Red Chamber ’77 looks like to those familiar with the classical 18^th century Chinese novel, in which a young, orphaned woman goes to live with her aristocratic relatives, falls in love with a philandering scion, and finally succumbs to multiple conspiracies with the fast-crumbling clan.

With his directorial debut, Chiu Kang-chien – now most well-known for his contributions to Hong Kong New Wave classics like Boat People, Nomad and An Amorous Woman of Tang Dynasty – relocates Cao Xueqin’s classic 18th century novel from feudal China to a snazzy, skyscraper-laden Singapore. In line with the film’s modern setting, Chiu transforms the damsel in distress in the original material into an independent, strong-willed woman who first observes, then changes, the life of her pampered, princely suitor.

Featuring surprisingly competent performances from a cast comprised mostly of first-time actors, Dream of the Red Chamber ’77 bears all the hallmarks of the jovial romantic dramas prevalent in mainstream Mandarin-language cinema of the day. There are courting young lovers having fun and breaking up on finely manicured lawns and in bustling urban landscapes, peppered by moments of saucy behaviour by the supporting characters and backed by pop musical numbers. The screening of a restored version of Chiu’s film at the Singapore International Film Festival is a landmark of sorts because of the way it was rediscovered.

After a week of sparsely attended screenings in a handful of Singapore cinemas back in January 1977, the film vanished from sight due to its lukewarm box office and the disappearance of one of its financiers. Having spent months in rehearsals before a 43-day shoot, most of the cast drifted away from acting and back to their original jobs. The male lead Gao Feng (real name Peng Tai Zhang), for example, went back to being a seaman. Plans to release the film in Hong Kong and Taiwan, markets grappling with a craze of Red Chamber adaptations, were also scrapped.

The film is considered by Singaporean film historians as a lost gem –and a very important one, given its standing as a rare independent movie in their city-state, as well as a pan-Chinese production featuring crew from abroad. Chiu is joined by Hong Kong-based DP Ricky Lau, editor Tony Chow and composer Stanley Chow. A much-deteriorated print was eventually found at the Taiwan Film and Audio-visual Institute. The Asian Film Archive set out to revive the film in 2023, but could only turn in a 4K black-and-white restoration due to the unsalvageable colour components in the material.

On the strength of this, one already sees Chiu’s own transformation from a studio-employed screenwriter at Shaw Brothers into a more experimental cineaste. The film begins with Daiyu (Liu Yanling, then using the stage name Su Xin Xin) arriving in Singapore from Taiwan. Over the opening credits, we travel with her in a taxi, marvelling at panoramic views of a modern, capitalist bastion complete with endless  highways, concrete tenement blocks, advertising placards, and busy markets. She then gets off at the Chia Mansion. In a montage of shots with echoes of Antonioni we are treated to an eerie tour of a vast villa of marble and stone, with its empty gardens and grand interiors. We finally get to see the meet-cute between the woman and Baoyu (Gao), an infantile young man riding a child’s bike and checking on her zodiac sign.

This is just one example of how Chiu reworks (and sometimes spoofs) a conventional romantic romp with wayward lensing (courtesy of Ricky Lau, who later became a director in his own right with the Mr. Vampire horror-comedy series) and dynamic editing (from Tony Chow, who worked on 1980s Hong Kong action classics such as the Tarantino-influencing City on Fire). But the film also serves as an important chronicle of Singapore’s  geographic landscape. Chiu and his producers scoop up location shots around the city’s developing landmarks, from the colonial ruins of Fort Canning to its towering housing complexes.

The film is also exceptional for its depiction of women as strong-willed and standing in solidarity with each other in difficult circumstances. In the original novel Daiyu is perennially sad, sickly and dependent of the charity of others; here, the protagonist arrives in Singapore because she wants to “stand up on her own two feet” away from the comfort zone of home, and readily chides Baoyu (and his family) for their idleness. In one scene, Daiyu actually asks Baoyu why his people couldn’t find something worthwhile to do while the Singapore government is embracing policies of economic development. In other circumstances, this might sound like official propaganda; in the hands of Chiu and the context of this irreverent satire of fossilised social mores, it is a clarion call which marks the new in this film.

Director, screenwriter: Chiu Kang-chien
Producers: Lu Chang Shung, Liu Mo-lung, Chiu Kang-chien
Executive producers: Kadarisman, Tan Kok Kiong
Cast: Su Xin Xin, Gao Feng, Tian Zhen, Yan Jing Ling, Wang Ting Ting
Director of photography: Ricky Lau Koon-wai
Editor: Tony Chow Kwok-chung
Music composer: Stanley Chow Fook-leung
Production company: Singapore Film Development Company
World sales: Asian Film Archive
Venue: Singapore International Film Festival (Landmarks)
In Mandarin
96 minutes

To describe Cactus Pears as such might be a bit reductive, but there’s more to this comparison than the fact that this film also revolves around two gay men consummating their suppressed feelings for another in a rural setting. Just like the work of that film’s Taiwanese director Ang Lee, Roham Parashuram Kanawade teases strikingly nuanced performances from his cast and subtle social commentary from what is essentially a very human story in his delicate feature-length debut.

Revolving around a Mumbai-based man’s conflicted feelings as he reconnects with a childhood sweetheart while he mourns the passing of his beloved father, Cactus Pears is at once a sensitive study of its two protagonists’ simmering feelings for each other, and also a portrait of a provincial community where everyone – from conservative elders waxing lyrical about long-held creeds to young people resigned to their fate – seems forced to play along to long-held and rarely challenged social norms.

To his credit, Kanawade veers away from painting his characters with moral brushstrokes, just as he and his production designer Tejashree Kapadne decline to portray this Indian village through simplistic visual signposts of rural poverty. There is a distinctive sequence in which the viewer is invited to decipher the class discrepancy between the two protagonists through the wealth of cooking utensils (and lack thereof) propping up the action foreground. It’s hardly a surprise that Cactus Pears’ international tour is still ongoing after its award-winning world premiere at Sundance. The film is bowing in competition at the Singapore International Film Festival just as it unspools on a limited roll-out in seven cities across the U.S.

The story begins as the desolate and dishevelled Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) arrives in his ancestral village to attend the ten-day funeral rite of his recently deceased father. With his head still spinning with the many rules he has to follow – that he must walk around barefoot, sleep on the floor and limit himself to two meals a day (with no extra helpings allowed) – he is also instantly subjected to many a disparaging remark from all around. He is criticised for wearing clothes of the right mourning colour and chided for having become feeble because he “works in an air-conditioned office” in the city.

His days eventually perk up when he reconnects with Balya (Suraaj Suman), who hails from a poorer family than Anand’s and has resigned himself to life as a farmer in the boondocks. While Kanawade starts off their scenes together with subtlety, the frisson between them is palpable from the get-go. The first glimpse of Balya’s sexuality (and, through deduction, Anand’s) is also hinted at rather than pronounced, as he is shown attending to a man – a “special friend” – who visits him from afar, for something “which might not need an hour” to finish.

And so their relationship slowly (and secretly) blooms, just as their families – specifically Anand’s stern uncle (Nitin Bansode), and Balya’s tradition-minded parents – continue to hassle them to fit in. In Anand’s case, it’s about acting more manly; Balya, meanwhile, has to fend off an arranged marriage with a comparatively wealthier girl, an arrangement that is supposed to make him whole and his family more financially secure. As the narrative moves along, however, it turns out that they are doing all this because they all know what this is about, but dare not speak its name. The relatives’ complicity is threatened by Anand’s mere presence and the way it galvanises Balya to defy his fate.

If the couple’s struggle against authority is the “sense” part of the story, the “sensibility” would have to be Anand’s longing for his dead father. Shunning the use of flashbacks, Kanawade simply peppers the film with his presence: for Anand, the old man is there in the yellowed photos of yore and the sweet birdsong at dusk. The viewer is then slowly led to the reasons and impact of that long-ago rupture of Anand’s relationship with his father, and how it feeds his own repression and reconciliation with his sexuality.

Expanding on the themes anchoring the two shorts he made about the sexual awakening of queer characters in rural India (Sundar, U for Usha), Kanawade’s solid screenplay is brought to life by electric performances from his two leads. Slowly and steadily, Manoj evokes Anand’s gradual transformation as he comes out of his shell to face up to both his desire and despair; Suman plays the yang to Manoj’s yin, as he brings Balya’s complex traits – hard-boiled farmer, tender lover, starry-eyed country boy – to the surface.

Director, screenwriter: Rohan Parashuram Kanawade
Producers: Neeraj Churi, Mohamed Khaki, Kaushik Ray, Hareesh Reddypalli, Naren Chandavarkar, Sidarth Meer
Executive producers: Ilann Girard, Kishor Vasant Sawant
Cast: Bhushaan Manoj, Suraaj Suman, Jayshri Jagtap
Director of photography: Vikas Urs
Editor: Anadi Athaley
Production designer: Tejashree Kapadne
Costume designer: Sachin Lovalekar
Sound designers: Anirban Borthakur, Naren Chandavarkar
Production companies: Lotus Visual Productions, Dark Stories, Taran Tantra Telefilms, Moonweave Films, Bridge Postworks
World sales: MPM Premium
Venue: Singapore International Film Festival (Asian Competition)
In Marathi
112 minutes

The story proceeds in chapters. One character’s tale get told and then another’s, a narrative style used outside of Asia earlier this year in Zach Cregger’s Weapons. Taken together, the individual stories in Mag Mag add up to a story about the murder of young men by Mag Mag, a mysterious entity that’s tall, female, shaggy-haired, and in pink. What exactly is she supposed to be? Well, that’s revealed early in a flashback. As with many horror films, sex is implicated somewhat in the origin story. There’s also bullying and body-shaming.

The film’s narrative threads are more than a handful, so it becomes a little tricky figuring out the thrust of the overall story. It certainly can’t be the identity of Mag Mag or its motivation. Both are revealed before the film is halfway. This, of course, suggests a twist might be coming. It is a decent twist—and yet as with what has gone before, the twist has its own threads. The result is an enervation of the film’s power, which it does a great job of building in the first few scenes. Perhaps the major plotline concerns Sanae (a wonderful Sara Minami) who attempts to figure out what’s happening after losing someone to Mag Mag.

As a first-time feature director, Yuriyan Retriever is abundantly talented. His orchestration of sound is impressive, his jump scares are effective, and he even figures out how to add a fun mini-musical somewhere in the tale. It does turn out, though, that his film’s main headache is fully linked to that abundance. Obviously, Retriever is a student of horror: he is quite adept at using the jump scare and a frightful, rising, piercing score to torture his viewers. The one lesson he perhaps didn’t absorb is the usefulness of brevity as a vehicle for terror.

At almost two hours, there is an abundance of screentime when the story doesn’t need it; there is also an abundance of characters and motivations, some of which destroys the film’s momentum. And this leads to Mag Mag pretty much becoming like a stand-up comedy show with too many filler jokes. A talented comedian—like a talented director—deserves praise for carrying his audience members to the end of a long show without boring them, but the utility of carrying an exhausted audience along should certainly be interrogated.

As the film goes on to yield its final secret, it seems to replace sexual love with filial love as its dominant subtext. This should be a grand twist—few screenplays are able to play the subtext game well enough to bait and switch—but given the convolutedness of Mag Mag’s third act, this twist is just a bit annoying. Maybe there is no need for subtext anyway. Just frighten us and be done. That’s hard enough these days. As one Mag Mag character says, “horror movies never really frighten me”.

Well, the one he’s in would probably do so. But first, it needs to lose about 20 minutes.

Director: Yuriyan Retriever
Screenplay:Eisuke Naitô
Cast: Sara Minami, Maeda Oshiro, Aoi Yamada
Cinematographer: Hideki Shima
Editor: Taki Yasuda
Producer: Daisuke Takahashi
Venue: Singapore International Film Festival (Asian Feature Film Competition)
In Japanese
112 min

Featuring a quietly intense performance from Lim Kay Tong as an uptight pensioner facing down his chequered past and uncertain future, The Old Man and His Car offers a much more humanist and hopeful narrative than its Hemmingway-like international title might suggest. Having made its bow in Tokyo last month, it returns home as the curtain-raiser to the Singapore International Film Festival’s Singapore Panorama section.

With its simple premise, relatable characters and a mild-mannered (and sometimes comical) poke at the social mores of Singaporean society, The Old Man and His Car should still have quite a bit of mileage in it, as festival programmers seek stories which might appeal to a more mature audience in-sync with the dilemmas faced in middle age and beyond.

The film opens with a home video showing two toddlers having fun in the sun. Those were happier memories for Hock (played by Lim), a lonely ex-schoolteacher simmering in his own solitude as he wraps his Singaporean life up on the eve of joining his son in Canada. Living alone after the recent death of his wife, he takes his leave early when he meets a former colleague (Richard Low) whose never-ending complaints and sleazy humour he can’t stand. He backs off from selling his car – the one thing that he seems to be passionate about – to June (Kristin Tiara) after taking umbrage of her annoying demands for a close inspection of the automobile and then a discount as well.

The acerbic humour soon gives way to human drama, however, as Kam eases Hock’s backstory – and also that of his old and new acquaintances — into the equation. As he grovels to a cop to get out of a traffic fine and berates a petrol station attendant of his age for washing his car without asking, it’s hard to see the much-respected mentor he is supposed to be during his younger days. His transformation from hero to zero is slowly explained as writer-director Kam reveals – through Hock’s awkward exchanges with people around him – a tumultuous relationship with his wife as the couple struggle with a marital crisis, his anguish attending to her during her painful last days, and his troubled relationship with his children.

Hock’s reconciliation with himself and all around him is made complete with an intimate tête-à-tête inside (where else?) his car with June, whose garrulous veneer conceals a family history just as complicated and oppressive as Hock’s. This is hardly a trailblazing twist, or surprising even, but Kam never really sets out to shock anyway. The Old Man and His Car careers along smoothly with Kam – who teaches at one of Singapore’s leading film schools – offering a case study of sturdy storytelling. Cinematographer Jeremy Lau manages to evoke the loneliness prevalent in the ever-bustling Lion City with daytime outdoor images marked by dulled contrasts, and interiors – Hock’s mostly – with sharp shadows. It’s a stark journey, but one that’s worth embarking on. 

Director, screenwriter: Michael Kam
Producers: Yeo Zhi Qi, Tang Kang Sheng, Angelina Marilyn Bok
Cast: Lim Kay Tong, Kristin Tiara, Richard Low, Vincent Tee
Director of photography: Jeremy Lau
Editor: Charliebebs Gohetia
Production designer: Javeus Toh
Music composer: Michael Asmara
Sound designer: Cheng Lijie
Production companies: Waking Life Pictures, Screentone, Kalehu
Venue: Singapore International Film Festival (Singapore Panorama)
In English, Mandarin and Hokkien
82 minutes

Universal in its theme about young people struggling against conformity and specific in its allusions to the socio-economic issues in stifling, stratified Singapore, Tan’s directorial debut is bolstered by Ranice Tay’s breakout performance as an adrenalin-fuelled rebel without a pause – an explosive turn that serves to salvage the film’s sporadic moments of over-expositional melodrama. Amoeba should easily multiply its appearances on the festival circuit after its premieres at Toronto, Busan and finally back home in Singapore, where it is in competition at the city’s annual international film festival.

If there’s another word that’s looming large over Amoeba, it’s “haunting”. First, a ghost: the film begins with a grainy, Blair Witch-like home video in which high-schoolers Choo (Tay) and Nessa (Nicole Lee) try (and fail) to record a paranormal presence lurking in the former’s bedroom. Then, a spectre: the film then cuts to a schoolyard-full of docile, seemingly spellbound students who silently watch a flag-raising ceremony and then breaks into a hypnotic school anthem about “respectful daughters of virtue”.

It’s a masterful montage of two scenes of wildly different textures and styles, and an ingenious way of equating the climate of obedience and fear of Singaporean school-life with the menace of an unseen yet omnipresent phantom. And this phantom is indeed everywhere at the fictional Confucian Girls’ Secondary School, where self-aggrandising announcements about its century-long legacy and its Olympic-size swimming pool are broadcast regularly through the tannoy, and teachers are heard berating their young wards by saying how a future as a street-sweeper beckons for those with bad grades.

With her short hair and even shorter temper, Choo sticks out like a sore thumb as she settles into her new surroundings. Joining a class mid-term, she quickly infuriates her homeroom teacher by describing class monitors as servants and calling for diligence lessons to be replaced by “napping time”. But Choo’s rare, rebellious streak also endears her to the very small coterie of “mean girls” who snack (secretly) in class, smoke (outside campus, of course) during recess and sing along (at home, mind) to Singaporean hip-hop.

In one amusing instance, the teenagers are seen clowning about in the apartment-sized bedroom of their poor-little-rich-girl leader Sonia (Lim Shi-an), shouting along to a gangsta rap number and declaring they want to become gangsters. Cut to: the girls seated comfortably on lush sofas and carpeted floors, as they huddle around to enjoy British-style afternoon tea as laid out by Sonia’s socialite mother, complete with cakes and scones and a silver serving tower. Another shocking juxtaposition, for sure, and one that serves as a subtle harbinger about the brittle nature of the young protagonists’ mutinous veneer.

The girls’ gung-ho spirit to life – embodied by a stage show they put together spoofing Singapore’s official origin-story – is soon put to the test as the school authorities get hold of the video that begins the film, a tape which contains much more of the teenagers’ so-called delinquent misadventures and snippets of gentle (and fully-clothed) intimacy between Choo and Nessa. Faced with real repercussions that could ruin their future, the girls’ long-suppressed but much-ingrained ideology of fear and obedience finally bubbles back to the surface with devastating effect.

Admittedly, Amoeba’s coming-of-age narrative arc is hardly new, and Tan – in a way, like her young protagonists – does fall back on some much-used melodramatic tropes to stir emotions and move the story along. By and by, however, her screenplay offers scathing critique against official machinations in coaxing and coercing the masses to fall in line, be content with their stock as “good citizens” – while the notions of class privilege, a foundation stone of capitalist creed, remain sacrosanct for all.

Neus Ollé’s camerawork and Sam Manacsa’s production design offers an evocative view of Singapore’s stuffy and stifling social fabric, with characters stuck in ennui in their luxurious condos, middle-class flats, hallowed school hallways and rubble-strewn construction sites. But Amoeba excels thanks to the dynamism of its cast, with Tay, Lee, Lim and Genevieve Tan (who plays the jester in the quartet) bringing fun and tristesse galore to the screen. This, perhaps, mirrors what Tan Siyou had wanted to say along with this very fine debut: it’s in the people, and with the people, that changes could eventually be brought about.

Director, screenwriter: Tan Siyou
Producers: Fran Borgia, Denis Vaslin, Antoine Simkine, Luisa Romeo, Han Sunhee
Executive producer: Fran Borgia
Cast: Ranice Tay, Nicole Lee, Lim Shi-an, Genevieve Tan
Director of photography: Neus Ollé
Editor: Félix Rehm
Production designer: Sam Manacsa
Production companies: Akanga Film Asia, Volya Films, Les Films d’Antoine, Mararía Films, Widelog Office
World sales: Diversion
Venue: Singapore International Film Festival (Competition)
In English, Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese
98 minutes

A competition entry at Venice and an award-winner in Busan, Girl boasts of all the credentials that would appeal to Singaporean cinephiles. More casual film-goers, meanwhile, will be drawn in by the presence of its director Shu Qi, who will follow up her appearance at the festival’s opening ceremony on November 26 with an on-stage conversation with Singaporean actor Rebecca Lim the following day.

Shu Qi’s transformation from bona fide film star to aspiring auteur, through an acting career spanning across two decades and a wildly diverse stylistic spectrum, also chimes with the SGIFF’s diverse programme – with its 121-film line-up ranging from crowd-pleasing festival hits from A-list directors to experimental shorts from first-time filmmakers. It’s a trajectory that echoes that of SGIFF Pro, the industry-oriented platform with conferences and pitching sessions designed for what the festival described as “the next wave of Asian trailblazers”.

Shu Qi will be joined at the festival by Tony Leung Chiu-wai, who be in town to talk about his career and his role in Hungarian cineaste Ildikó Enyedi’s Germany-set Silent Friend. India-born Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta, who will be bestowed with the SGIFF Cinema Honorary Award, will talk about her work and specifically her Elements Trilogy (Fire, Earth, Water), which will be shown at the festival alongside the more recent Funny Boy (2020).

Another honorary award winner, the Oscar-winning Korean actress Youn Yuh-jung (Minari), will also feature in a masterclass. Singapore will be represented by local boy-done-good Chin Han (The Dark Knight, Avatar: The Last Airbender), who will take the stage to talk about a career which has transcended boundaries in both geography and genre.

Beyond the stars, the focus of the festival actually lies with its Silver Screen Awards. Inaugurated at its fourth edition in 1991 as a showcase of new Asian cinema, with two prizes going to Best Asian Film and Best Singaporean Short Film of the year, the format of the competition has been changed and expanded several times since then.

This year, ten films will be competing for the top-tier Asian Feature Film awards, with some of them arriving in Singapore with prizes and critical acclaim in their wake – Sho Miyake’s Locarno winner Two Seasons, Two Strangers and Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s Venice awardee Human Resource, for example, or Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s Cannes Critics’  Week entry A Useful Ghost and Tribeny Rai’s Busan-San Sebastian nominee Shape of Momo.

Los Angeles-based filmmaker Tan Siyou will be batting for the home team with coming-of-age drama Amoeba, an audacious attack on Singaporean social mores and a title which has been gaining momentum on the festival circuit after its world premiere in Toronto in September. Away from the competition, another Singaporean festival hit making a triumphant homecoming comes in the shape of Michael Kam’s The Old Man and His Car, which bowed in Tokyo’s Asian Futures programme last month.

The film features a powerful turn from veteran actor Lim Kay Tong, a Singaporean national treasure whose career ranges from local theatre and a U.S. TV series (Noble House) to an odd foray into Indian arthouse cinema (The Photograph). The Old Man and His Car opens the Singapore Panorama section alongside three other world-premiere titles (the documentaries At Home With Work and Coda, plus the slapstick comedy Sandbox) and should certainly inspire young filmmakers about the rewards of persistence. An alumni of the Berlinale Talents programme, Kam has spent the past two decades making prize-winning short films (and teaching at his alma mater Ngee Ann Polytechnic) before finally getting this first feature off the ground.

Shorts form one of the crucial cornerstones for SGIFF as well. Twenty-five titles will be competing in the Southeast Asian Short Film Competition, with seven world premieres and six Singaporean entries.

SGIFF’s emphasis on the new runs in parallel with its revival of past gems. The Deepa Mehta mini-retrospective makes up part of Landmarks, a section spearheaded by Bye Bye Love, Isao Fujisawa’s subversive no-budget film maudit about a couple’s increasingly tragic and fatalist rampage through urban Japan in the 1970s. Among other recently restored titles bowing in the section this year are Sri Lankan cineaste Sumitra Peries’ The Girls, Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab’s The Razor’s Edge, Hong Kong auteur Tang Shu-shuen’s The Arch and Pedro Almodovar’s Matador.

And then there’s Dream of the Red Chamber, Chiu Kang-chien’s radical remake of the Chinese literary classic. Relocating the novel to 1970’s Singapore – with its original title being “Dream of the Red Chamber à la mode” – the Taiwanese screenwriter-filmmaker’s work is a snapshot of the city-state’s stratified social structures during its days as a teething economic powerhouse, with its young characters facing the very 20^th century dilemmas of social mobility and migration.

More importantly, it also documents the state of Singaporean cinema of the time, a production markedly different from the Chinese-language or Bollywood-tinged studio offerings of the day. The presence of this film is also testament to SGIFF’s very own mission and curatorial strategies, with its combination of star-powered events, industry-oriented ateliers, audience-friendly selections (in the shape of the panoramic Horizons and genre-heavy Foreground strands), as well as the more edgy social-critique content in Standpoint and the experimental Undercurrrent.