Paris and Other Happenings

Happy to announce that Snow City has been chosen to screen at Cinéma du Réel, 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.