That’s one of two theses of this exploration of the way of life of the Kbal Romeas community, a group indigenous to Cambodia. The filmmakers open with the community adjusting to a new place after a flood has forced a recalibration of their lives. Some of people have moved away after receiving government compensation. The film is about those who stayed.

As with the rest of the community that has remained, Neang, the film’s protagonist, is adamant about staying and preserving the land of her ancestors. Which means going against land encroachers big and small. In one scene, she joins a group that nabs a logger armed with a tractor and chainsaw.

But in the grand scheme of things, he’s small fry and largely inconsequential. Sure, his tools can take down a decent number of trees, but there are two threats to the community, both of which are ideological. Ly is able to present both without explicitly naming either. Which is very impressive for a debut feature director.

The first of these threats is capitalism, as represented by a plantation company that is gobbling up land in chunks, despite the protected nature of the grounds. The other is modernism. Until the Orchid Blooms is asking, in part: Is there a place for the Kbal Romeas traditional way of life in today’s world? It’s an oblique question and director and cinematographer Polen Ly doesn’t provide the answer. Instead, the style of documentary deployed is the unhurried, minimally intrusive sort.

Neang and a couple of other people speak to the camera a few times, but the film mostly follows its subjects going about their day. And while the question of the viability of the community’s tradition stands as the overarching purpose of the film, there is a smaller, more intimate one concerned with Neang’s son. He’s away from his mother initially but he returns home, seemingly reluctantly.

From his exchanges with his mother and from her own recollection of their past, it appears he would rather see mother move away from the village. Thus, their own relationship is a smaller battle of tradition versus modernity. That’s a theme several films, documentary and otherwise, have covered. But by locating it in an indigenous community, Until the Orchid Blooms courts a kinship with The Territory, the 2022 Sundance documentary about the Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people of Brazil.

For her part, the film’s preternaturally stubborn heroine is in the same sorority as the fictional older protagonist of Jeremiah Lemohang Mosese’s This Is Not a Burial, It Is a Resurrection, a Lesotho film that also shows a government representative stranded in the middle of a fight between technology and tradition.

A key difference between both films — besides the obvious geographical difference between Africa and Asia — lies in Until the Orchid Blooms‘ presentation of the ambivalence of a younger generation. It turns out that some of the young people from the community have taken up jobs on the same plantation that is encroaching on their people’s land. The pay is not particularly great but it is better than nothing. As one of the employed young men puts it, “What else can I do? I’m poor.”

The film goes on a bit after that statement is made. But make no mistake: that statement is the second thesis of this fine but occasionally draggy documentary.

Director, cinematography: Polen Ly
Producers: Lucas Sénécaut for L’Oeil Vif Productions, Thibaut Amri for Avant la Nuit, Rithy Panh for Anupheap Production
Editing: Penda Houzangbé, Jack Atmore
Sound design: Hugo Rossi
Venue: Singapore International Festival
103 minutes
In Bunong, Khmer

Having brought her project to Torino Film Lab, Cannes l’Atelier and Venice’s Production Bridge during its long gestation period, following her first long feature, Innocents, in 2012, Wong returns with an adaptation focused almost solely on her unravelling protagonist. There are definitely merits to this narrative edit, as it makes the film more universal in its themes and more palatable to international audiences with less knowledge about Singapore’s social idiosyncrasies.

But it’s exactly these idiosyncrasies that makes the city-state unique, as they provide fertile ground for the social satires, dystopic genre flicks and suppressed melodramas which propelled Singaporean cinema to festival success and global recognition. While there are hints in City of Small Blessings’ first half hour about a tussle between the little man and the state machine, or a confrontation between the old and the new, Wong eventually settles on a story about a self-entitled, increasingly irritable man’s ever more delusional acts to save face, resist change and deny responsibility for his own role in his downfall.

As the film begins, Prakash (Victor Banerjee) is a civil, mild-mannered 70-year-old revered among the social and political élite for his past service as the headmaster of Singapore’s top-ranked high school and then as director-general of the education ministry. When not spending downtime with his wife Anna (Noorlinah Mohamed) in their large and airy bungalow with its finely manicured gardens, Prakash attends prestigious social functions, meets old friends at golf clubs and hotel cafes.

We get to see this perfect embodiment of the benign bureaucrat when he peppers his acceptance speech of an honorary award with mentions of “stakeholders” and praise for development in Singapore. But Prakash is soon served a dose of his own medicine when he is informed that he and his wife have been living as trespassers in their rented home, as the house has already been acquired by the government, and its location is ear-marked for the construction of a new subway line. Meetings with transport apparatchiks only yield blank faces and scornful retorts.

Prakash’s veneer as a righteous warrior gradually slips. It turns out he has known about the eviction order for months, and has been putting the issue off. The painful backstory revolves around how the comparatively well-off couple ended up not owning their home, even in old age. His claim that the authorities made mistakes in their zoning plans are soon revealed to be bogus. Initially hesitating to ask for help from a former student who is a high-ranking environmental official, Prakash soon descends into a petition-writing frenzy in which he resorts to name-calling, rank-pulling and emotional blackmailing for his own interest.

Working with Japanese DP Hideho Urata (Plan 75, Stranger Eyes) and production designer James Page, Wong provides excellent imagery to accompany her revelations of Prakash’s messed-up real self. In a row with Anna, he bursts into a cramped room filled with storage boxes – a chaos that is markedly different from the tidy and neat spaces outside, and a sign of the man’s habit of filing problems away from view. From then on, the house’s appearance on screen shifts: in tilting or wider shots, we see rickety roofs and worn pillars.

Spliced together by the editing trio of Lee Chatametikool, Harin Paesongthai and Ivy Chin, the imagery provides much-needed relief in a story driven by the maddening moves of a very unsympathetic protagonist. Banerjee delivers a powerful turn as he swivels between his character’s fluctuating emotions and morality, and Noorlinah Mohamed matches them with a performance that is less a long-suffering wife than a companion daring the protagonist to face the devil in himself. The same goes for Brendon Fernandez as the couple’s son Neel, who is forced to return from his home in Los Angeles to help his mother and battle his long-estranged father.

Director: Chen-hsi Wong
Screenwriter: Chen-hsi Wong, adapted from a novel by Simon Tay
Producers: Fran Borgia, Gary Goh, Teh Su Ching, Chen-his Won
Executive producers: Melvin Ang, Ng Say Yong
Cast: Victor Banerjee, Noorlinah Mohamed, Brendon Fernandez, Toh Kia Hing, Timonthy Nga
Cinematography: Hideho Urata
Editing: Lee Chatametikool, Harin Paesongthai, Ivy Chin
Production design: James Page
Music: Teo Wei Yong
Production companies: Akanga Film Asia, mm2 Entertainment, Purple Tree Pictures, Analog Robot
Venue: Singapore International Film Festival (Asian Feature Competition)
In English
118 minutes

Inspired by a walk around a small Turkish town and made on a budget of just over $55,000 – with part of that coming from bank loans and the sale of his sister’s jewelry – One of Those Days When Hemme Dies is a visually arresting and delicately written piece that rivals any of the hothouse-grown directorial debuts bowing at festivals these days. Proving himself an auteur in the making, Firatoglu — who is a lawyer by profession — has already chalked up a series of award-winning festival appearances at Venice, Sao Paulo, Almaty and now Singapore.

Like the self-taught Korean filmmaker Park Jung-bum, who trained as a physical education teacher in university but pivoted to making visually idiosyncratic, social-realist films, Firatoglu also produces and stars in his own work. Audaciously, One of Those Days When Hemme Dies is miles away from the usual Istanbul-based cineaste universe. Here he plays Eyüp, a rugged, debt-ridden labourer who earns his living transporting and salting tomatoes on a farm in the sun-drenched southwestern plains of Turkey.

After a violent fracas with a foreman (the Hemme in the title) over his much-delayed pay, Eyüp storms off and hatches a plan to murder his foe. From there, he embarks on a journey in which his furious desire for vengeance recedes as he meanders down country roads, small town back alleys, lush gardens and barren grocery shops.

The gradual transformation of Eyüp’s demeanour is signposted in the film’s tonal shift. While things kick off as though in a Nuri Bilge Ceylan movie – albeit one that’s unfolding in broad daylight – the story is slowly taken over by the kind of humour and humanism inherent in the work of Abbas Kiarostami. It’s hard not to laugh at the many instances in which Eyüp is detained by his new acquaintances and subjected to a rambling monologue, and equally difficult not to be moved by the awkward silences punctuating his reunion with a woman who was probably a teenage lover from his past.

Working with the cinematographic trio of Nedim Dedcan, Semir Yildiz and Abdurrahman Öncu, Firatoglu conjures striking visual beauty out of the most mundane of activities (like sequences of back-breaking tomato picking in the fields that seem taken from real life) and the most banal of landscapes (as when Eyüp is slowly reduced to a small dot as he rides away on his rickety red motorcycle, or marches down passageways).

Eyüp’s own problems become less and less of an issue for him and the viewer as the film proceeds. As many a theorist has said about road movies, it’s always less about the traveller than the landscape he travels through. It’s hardly a spoiler to reveal Hemme doesn’t die, because that’s a red herring anyway. This is a film about one of those dog days in the life of an unlucky fellow, and the redemption and epiphany he – and we – get to experience as time passes. It describes how life must go on, with people standing side by side, as in the curiously framed wedding dances that bookend the film.

Director, screenwriter, producer: Murat Firatoglu
Cast: Murat Firatoglu, Sefer Firatiglu, Salih Tasci
Cinematography: Nedim Dedcan, Semir Yildiz, Abdurrahman Öncu
Editor: Eyyup Zana Ekinci
Sound designer: Emir Mugra Kazak
Production company: Nefes Film
World sales: Luxbox
Venue: Singapore International Film Festival (Asian Feature Competition)
In Turkish
81 minutes

First things first: no crocodile tears are shed in Crocodile Tears, either of the literal or proverbial kind. Offering a straightforward story anchored to simple emotions – an overbearing single mother, her feeble manchild of a son, and a young woman placing herself in peril by standing in between the pair – Tumpal Tampubolon continues his on-screen meditation on young men’s Oedipal instincts, the same theme that drives his award-winning short film The Sea Calls for Me, in which a boy fashions a discarded blow-up doll into a surrogate mother.

Set in a small town in Indonesia, the story revolves around Johan (Yusuf Mahardika), a young man who spends his time running the family’s dilapidated crocodile park. When not cleaning the grounds or feeding live poultry to the rapturous reptiles, the eager youth runs errands in town. It’s a chance for him to connect to women – only most of them mock him as a smelly country bumpkin.

The person most disturbed by Johan’s bubbling desire is his mother (Marissa Anita), who lectures him for being “unclean” after discovering some suspect stains on his underwear. But her concern is less about morality and more about her own suppressed desires: with her husband long gone, she shares her bed with her son and sleeps with him locked in her tight embrace every night.

Torn between his feelings for mama and his wish to break away from his grimy existence, Johan’s ambivalence towards his mother’s domineering personality turns into straightforward rebellion after he meets the new-in-town karaoke bar hostess Arumi (Zulfa Maharani). A headstrong type who has no qualms about dissing both wolf-whistling louts or her own friends, Arumi soon discovers her new lover’s complicated relationship with his mother — as well as connecting his missing father and the alligators the family feeds every day.

Having passed through myriad script-writing labs and pitching markets in Southeast Asia and Europe before attaining its final on-screen form, Crocodile Tears is a polished thriller that could rival any of its commercial counterparts at home. The film’s first half hour is sprinkled with surprises and oozes suspense from every sweaty, tropical pore. But Johan’s meet-cute and romance with Arumi puncture the film’s aura. They also wreck the on-screen family’s delicate emotional balance, while the young woman’s delightful independence somehow falls apart as she is reduced to a victim and a cipher.

Though the screenplay has a few flaws, Crocodile Tears is boosted by nuanced performances from its stars. Mahardika’s performance convincingly embodies the fury and uncertainty of Johan’s stunted emotional growth, but Anita’s channeling of the neurotic mother is the terrifying highlight of the film, as she constantly shifts gears between her character’s daytime working-class-mom persona and her pent-up and traumatised-widow nocturnal version.

Director, screenplay: Tumpal Tampubolon
Cast: Yusuf Mahardika, Marissa Anita, Zulfa Maharani
Producers: Mandy Marahimin, Anthony Chen, Claire Lajoumard, Yi Peng Teoh, Christophe Lafont, Harry Flöter, Jörg Siepmann
Cinematography: Teck Siang Lim
Editors: Jasmine Ng Kin Kia, Kelvin Nugroho
Production designer: Jafar Shiddiq
Costume designer: Hagai Pakan
Music: Kin Leonn
Sound designer: Roman Dymny
Production companies: Talamedia in association with Acrobates Films, Giraffe Pictures PTE LTD, Poetik Film, 2Pilots Filmproduction GmbH
World sales: Cercamon
Venue: Singapore International Film Festival (Competition)
In Indonesian
98 minutes

The film was cowritten by Adriaan van der Staay, a visionary municipal official who championed the use of cinema (alongside architecture and poetry) as the engine for urban renewal in Rotterdam, van der Staay was the man who gave Bals his big break by asking him to help draft proposals which would eventually give birth to IFFR. With his decade-long tenure as the director of the Rotterdam Arts Foundation and his later involvement with the founding and operations of the city’s myriad galleries and museums, van der Staay is perhaps the unsung hero for the Dutch port-city’s cultural renaissance in the 1960s and 1970s. A documentary about his work and his views in arts and culture is long overdue.

The House of Janus, however, is not that film. While the now 91-year-old yet still very robust van der Staay is nearly omnipresent in the film, he is seen or heard mostly recalling the construction and upkeeping of his beloved summer villa in the Italian countryside.

While van der Staay’s commentaries could still be considered as worthy observations about rural Italian architecture and garden landscapes – the nonagenarian has pivoted into this field after his departure from cultural policy-making around the end of the 1990s – his insightful recollections are largely rendered secondary by director Keng Sen Ong’s attempt to play up the unseen and largely unspoken emotional bonds between the villa and its soon-to-depart owner.

Mostly known for his work as the artistic director of Singapore’s premier contemporary theatre collective T:>Works, Ong somehow mirrors van der Staay’s affections for his rural retreat with the mythical romance between the Trojan warrior Aeneas and his forced separation from his lover Dido. Given the tranquility of the Umbrian landscape on show and van der Staay’s largely soft-spoken demeanour, Ong’s allegory is as audacious as it is overwrought. Or is it really representative of a hidden aspect of van der Staay’s character that only the director himself knows?

We’ll never really get to the bottom of that by watching The House of Janus, which received its world premiere in the Singapore International Film Festival’s experimental Undercurrents section. While we see Ong cleaning the house, having candlelight dinners and enjoying the summer sunshine with van der Staay, the director has somehow decided against providing any context whatsoever about his friend’s colourful background or personality.

It’s not even very clear whether van der Staay really does see his fading relationship with his architectural brainchild as similar to the melodramatic parting of Dido and Aeneas. Rather, The House of Janus could (or should) actually be seen as the product of Ong’s own fascination with that fiery and doomed romance, and a corollary of his recent stage adaptation of Henry Purcell’s 17^th century opera about the two mythical figures.

Throughout the film, Ong interweaves van der Staay’s monologues and his quotidian rural routines with Thomas Michael Allen and Michael(a) Daoud’s burlesque renditions of scenes and songs from Purcell’s opera. In one nocturnal scene, the villa’s classically built veranda is transformed into a garishly lit space described as a “bondage altar” in the closing credits. In another, Allen’s dying character (who is supposed to be the spurned Dido, but named simply as “The Unloved One” in the credits) croons a torch song in Daoud’s arms, in a posture resembling the Pièta.

The House of Janus may be baffling at times, but the artifice – or should we say edifice? – is unquestionably beautiful. In the quieter moments of the film – the close-ups of flora and fauna in the garden, or the tracking shots through those Umbrian country roads – Camille Lacadee’s camerawork provides moving visual counterpoints to van der Staay’s voiceovers about the history of the land he considers his home away from home, and the fortunes of neighbours he now considers more like close family.

Gabor Csongradi’s dazzling soundscapes adds a welcoming frisson and mystique to the most tranquil of scenes, as conversations are suddenly obscured by crescendos of electronic interference. Such interventions provide the moments which really live up to the film’s title, as they elevates Ong’s film into the sublime, a creature staring at once back at the past and forward into a fuzzy future.

Director: Keng Sen Ong
Screenwriters: Adriaan van der Staay, Keng Sen Ong
With: Thomas Michael Allen, Michael(a) Daoud, Keng Sen Ong, Adriaan van der Staay
Producer: Traslin Ong
Cinematography, editing: Camille Lacadee
Music, sound designer: Gabor Csongradi
Production company: T:>Works Singapore
Venue: Singapore International Film Festival (Undercurrent)
In Dutch, English
80 minutes