Pin Pin Tan
2011 / Singapour / 15 min
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Ours polaires, inauguration en grande pompe d’un tunnel routier ou douche de camions sur un chantier – de cette promenade surprenante dans Singapour sourd un humour aussi discret qu’absurde.
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Polar bears, the fanfare of a road tunnel inauguration or a truck wash on a building site – from this surprising stroll around Singapore, there wells up a discreet yet absurd humour.
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3 screenings
Vendredi/ Friday, 23 Mars 16H30 Cinéma 2
Dimanche/ Sunday, 25 Mars 13H00 Cinéma 1
Mercredi/Wednesday, 28 Mars 17H00 Centre Wallonie Bruxelles
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About
I was making a film about the aura of places in Singapore so I traveled around Singapore and filmed my surrounds with a heightened state of awareness. The familiar, like cleaners washing tires, became unfamiliar, and the ordinary, office workers going out for lunch, extraordinary. This “tour” was undertaken in 2006 and though the project morphed into an entirely different film (Invisible City, 2007) some of these images which were not used refused to leave my mind. Every now and again, I would go back to review the rushes knowing that there was a thread through them but I could not quite articulate it.

One day, under a deadline for the Singapore Biennale, we revisited the images and in three days Sun Koh and I cut SNOW CITY together. I believe one of the roles of cinema is to make dreamscapes out of the familiar. In SNOW CITY I invite visitors to lock step with me as I explore this dreamlike terrain, this headspace, this way of seeing.

I will be present at the screenings.

“If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he’s looking for. I think that, as I’ve always had dogs, I’ve learned from them how to do this. And so you then have a small amount of material, and you accumulate things, and it grows; one thing takes you to another, and you make something out of these haphazardly assembled materials. And, as they have been assembled in this random fashion, you have to strain your imagination in order to create a connection between the two things. If you look for things that are like the things that you have looked for before, then, obviously, they’ll connect up. But they’ll only connect up in an obvious sort of way, which actually isn’t, in terms of writing something new, very productive. So you have to take heterogeneous materials in order to get your mind to do something that it hasn’t done before”.
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W.G. Sebald
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What am I doing these days? Just sniffing around

Happy to announce that Snow City has been chosen to screen at Cinema du Reel, in Competition and I will attending this screening in Paris end March. This is a country which holds cinema in such high regard that we were told that our films will be touring Paris Prisons as part of a prison screening scheme. Mind boggling. Then again this is a country where the cultural attache in the French Embassy in Singapore contacts me to ask if I need assistance with booking my flight and proceeds to book it for me with insurance thrown in. It is nice to swim in these waters. By the way, do recommend places to visit for a Parissienne newbie. I know I will be torn between watching great films, meeting folks and touring Paris during my too short stay.

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The Impossibility of Knowing which has screened recently at the Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film Festival, the 6th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival will be screening at the 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival. I have been a great fan of Ann Arbor (most secondhand bookshops per square mile) and the Festival, great films, since my Chicago days. You get a sense of a festival’s community vibe when they offer to put filmmakers up in hosts’ homes and they offer airport pick ups for filmmakers by volunteers. I suppose that is why it has lasted 50 years. Congrats, Ann Arbor!

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Meanwhile, Singapore GaGa is touring the USA. After James River Film Society in Virginia, it has gone to the Nightingale in Chicago, International House Philadelphia, Vassar College, New York and up next, Wellesley College. Special thanks to the exposure from the Flaherty Seminar Screenings for this incredible journey.

Seems that the only way for me to travel these days is to make films, so perhaps I should make more films especially to visit Vladivostok, Havana, Tehran, Caucasus, Pyongyang, Chile, Sao Paolo, Vilnius, Tallinn and the Balkans, land of Emir Kusturica.

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I am currently completing two commissions for the National Library which I will update you about soon. One, a work about the Yangtze Scribbler and another, an animation. More later!

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A few of us have been canvassing the Singapore Film Commission to give more recognition to cultural and artistic films in their funding schemes. Documentaries for example have been excluded from these schemes for too long. I hope to see more great films now that the new criteria are in place.

For four days in Sept, Anke Leweke, film critic and Berlinale programmer, Korean director Lee Seong-gyou and I watched 13 documentaries which made it to the DMZDoc’s International Competition section as jury members. It was super intense marathon viewing session and this was followed by a long session to decide on the winners. As a filmmaker myself, I felt very inspired by what I saw.

Our deepest congratulations to all the filmmakers. It was a privilege to witness the effort that went into the films. Here is our statement.

“First of all we would like to thank you all directors that have presented us with your visions. It is clear to us that the 9/11 and the clash of Civilisations that it represents had a huge impact on the world. 5 of the 13 films had that as the main theme or at least the underlying theme. The other strong theme is the abject poverty in some parts of the world. In any case, more and more people are left out of the world, either on their own accord or because of the system. The best documentaries try to understand the problems and effects in an even-handed way.
We had to decide between films that had strong persuasive political agendas and films that were less politically ambitious but had very strong personal, even singular points of view. In this day and age, is one kind of film more important than others? There are no clear cut answers. So we had to grapple with the role of documentary films, indeed, all filmmaking today.
So for the Special Jury Prize, we would like to give it to Bombay Beach by Alma Har’el. It is easy to make a film about poverty but difficult to do it well because such films usually focus on the poor conditions only, with not enough on the complicity of the director to make and perpetuate such poverty through their films.
Bombay Beach is on the surface about the very poor who live in an isolated place in the middle of the desert in USA. The director in the middle of cinema verite sequences intersperses moments with dance sequences performed by the protagonists themselves that felt true to their lives. This device cleverly shedslight on the performative aspects of documentary and the unspoken collaboration every director needs between herself and the protagonists to make the films.
The White Goose Award goes to The Tiniest Place by Tatiana Huezo. How do you make a film about all the pain and death in war without showing pictures of the war, without talking heads, showing only beautiful tropical scenery, and simple day to day life of villagers in a small village in El Salvador? But we can listen to the thoughts of the villages who have survived the war through their voiceovers. Many are still struggling with the memories and living with the death of their loved ones. So a third film starts to exist in your mind.

But mainly we see that life has also gone on. Calves are born, chicks are hatched, children are born. And so a village is reborn out of ashes, put so simply and lyrically.”

Distributor Objectifs has informed me that there are only 30 units of the Tan Pin Pin Box Set (pic on the left) left. So if you were keen but haven’t bought the set, now is the time to buy it. There won’t be future editions. If you are in Singapore, you can buy them at Kinokuniya at Takashimaya or from Objectifs. If you are overseas, please email info@objectifs.com.sg or call +65 6293 9782 to get a copy. They are priced at SG$49 (US$37)

Those many of you who have bought copies for themselves and their friends. THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

Hightlights
The Tan Pin Pin Box Set contains award-winning Singapore GaGa, Moving House and Invisible City. Invisible City is only available as part of the box set and it is not sold separately. Invisible City contains liner notes written by Alfian Sa’at, DVD commentary between myself and Tan Siok Siok as well as a short documentary about Ivan Polunin’s (under-rated) Sound Archive. Singapore GaGa has a myriad of specials, including an interview with Juanita Melson, Victor Khoo and myself in a bumboat along the Esplanade. The whole package was designed by mindwasabi. Buy it now!

Photo of Launch at Kinokuniya!

The Singapore Biennale opens next weekend. 63 artists from the world over including nine of us from Singapore are showing work in four locations for two months. Since the theme of this event is “process”, the curators have chosen to highlight not just my recent films, but my doggerel as well.

I will be showing six films including my first film, Moving House (搬家) 1997 and two new works, one of which (Snow City) was just completed two weeks ago. They have chosen not just the documentaries but a drama (Rogers Park) and a short experimental work (Ivan Polunin’s Sound Archive). The films will play in a loop for the duration of the Biennale at the Moving Image Gallery at 8Q Singapore Art Museum.

>>On Sat, 12 March, 2.30pm at that location, I will be in attendance to present the Singapore premieres of the two new works, The Impossibility of Knowing and Snow City. The screening followed by a Q&A will last an hour, admission details are below. I look forward to seeing you.

The Impossibility of Knowing 11 min, HD, 2010 Singapore Premiere NEW
The director visits locations that have experienced tragedies in the past to look for a clue of those happenings. Featured locations include the Nicoll Highway tunnel collapse site, Seletar Express Way, where a rare deer was run over, and a canal at Bukit Batok Ave 8 where a drowning took place. Under the scrutiny of the camera arises a dialogue between images and the voice over, between past and present and between what we imagine and what really happened.

Snow City 16 min, DVCam, 2011 International Premiere NEW
A film that is the result of a Singapore walkabout featuring polar bears, snow, a river crossing and a tunnel opening

9th August 7 min, mixed video formats, 2006
A ritual that never changes, the Singapore’s National Day Parades from 1965-2006. This was commissioned by the National Museum of Singapore to be the finale of the History of Singapore permanent exhibit there.

Ivan Polunin’s Sound Archive DVCam, 5 min, 2008
Film ethnographer Ivan Polunin gave the director sound recordings from the 1950s. Locations covered include the swamps at Tuas to a coffee shop. This piece examines the veracity of such recordings which are disembodied from the visuals.

Rogers Park 16mm, 11 min, 2000
A drama about a latchkey boy, his neighbour upstairs and the neighbourhood cat and its owner. They all converge in a way that only cinema can manipulate.

Moving House 1997 Beta SP & 16mm, 21 min, 1997
The director films the exhumation of her great-grandfather and great-grandmother’s gravesite. They were the first in her family from China to stake their ground in Singapore only to be exhumed 80 years later. This is the earlier version of a work that eventually won the Student Academy Award in 2002

Total Running Time: 1 hour 12 min. The films play in a loop

Location: Moving Image Galley, 8Q, Singapore Art Museum
8 Queen Street, Off Bras Basah Road. Phone: (65) 6332 3200
Time: 13 March – 14 May (2 months) Opens 10am-7pm daily.
Entrance: $10, free if you are a student
More details here