A few years back at the 48th San Francisco International Film Festival the organizers shone a spotlight on a sextet of films representing an emergent wave of independent film coming out of Malaysia, a multi-cultural society where the development of digital video and the growing sophistication of a new, cine-literate generation had taken the international film festival circuit by storm.  For me, the showcase was a thrilling exposure to the social realities and divergent voices of Malaysia’s diverse ethnicities.  Included among that showcase was the world premiere of Woo Ming Jin’s Lampu merah mati (Monday Morning Glory, 2005).

Dispatching to indieWire from the 2007 Rotterdam International Film Festival, Dennis Lim reiterated that “[t]he growing diversity of Malaysian film reflects the irreducible complexity of Malaysian society, which is composed of not fully integrated Malay, Chinese, and Indian ethnic groups and where identity is intricately bound up with race, religion, class and stark differences between rural and urban experiences.” The world premiere of Woo Ming Jin’s sophomore feature The Elephant and the Sea proved to be the discovery of the Rotterdam International for Lim who praised the film’s “economical storytelling, evocative details, dry wit, and ample visual intelligence” and who concluded that—with any luck—the film would have a festival life in its future.

Luck prevailed.  The Elephant and the Sea went on to screen at roughly 30 film festivals, winning the “Best Director” and “Critics” Awards at last year’s Cine Digital Seoul Film Festival; the “Special Jury Award” at the Torino Film Festival, and another “Best Director” Award at Spain’s recently concluded DIBA Digital Barcelona Film Festival.

Continue Reading "REVIEW of THE ELEPHANT AND THE SEA"...

Why are most mainstream film awards crap? I don’t know; don’t ask me.

The Festival Filem Malaysia (Malaysian film awards) continues to be a baffling, mind-boggling affair year after year. They once snubbed one of the most important Malaysian filmmakers, Yasmin Ahmad, with the excuse that her films continue to show nothing new or different. Like many other awards events, the decisions can sometimes be rather weird. For example, for this year’s awards, probably the worst film released this year, the laughable horror film Congkak, picked up four nominations, including, gulp, Best Director. That itself, is a horror story. It also got one for Best Sound, when the direction for the sound seemed to be to make everything as loud as possible.

But among the jury this year is independent filmmaker Amir Muhammad, whose mainstream film, Susuk, co-directed with Naeim Ghalili, picked up 8 nominations, including Best Cinematography (by Devan R.) and Best Score (by Hardesh Singh). Osman Ali’s crime drama, Anak Halal, leads the pack with 12 nominations. Mamat Khalid’s noir comedy horror, Kala Malam Bulan Mengambang, and Wayang by Hatta Azad Khan, are tied at second with 11 nominations each.

In the digital film category, there are no international-award winners this year. For example, Woo Ming Jin’s The Elephant And The Sea is conspicuously missing,and so is Liew Seng Tat’s Flower In The Pocket. Instead, we have the horrid TV movie Wirasiswi. A consolation here would be 22-year-old Mark Tan’s commendable debut, Jarum Halus.

The strangest of all? A Best Art Direction nomination for Johnny Bikin Filem, a film that was to have been released in March but has disappeared once again into oblivion.

Full list of nominations after the break:

Continue Reading "Festival Filem Malaysia: ANAK HALAL leads the noms"...

Last night in California, the 34th annual Saturn Awards that honored works in science fiction, fantasy, and horror in film, television, and home video has announced the winners.  I was confident The Mist would take home the award in the best horror film category but to my surprise, the dark musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street was the winner.  In the best sci-fi film category, the kaiju-inspired/documentary Cloverfield came out on top while the charming Enchanted score an impressive three awards for best fantasy film, best actress (awarded to Amy Adams), and best music.  Director Guillermo del Toro who flew from London was present to pick up the George Pal Memorial Award from the organization in recognition of his visionary genius within the genre.

You’ll find the complete list of the winners below after the break.  What do you think of the picks?

Continue Reading "34th SATURN AWARDS Winners Announced"...

Lately, Malaysian director Yasmin Ahmad’s been making a name for herself on the international film festival circuit, with her biggest win yet at 2007’s Berlinale, where Mukhsin won two awards. But few people know that she is already a highly established creative director in the Malaysian advertising industry, even long before she started making feature films. She has written and directed a number of award-winning ads, all of which qualify as short films on their own.

Tan Hong Ming In Love, a public service ad made and aired on Malaysian TV last year, has been winning awards around the globe, and continues to do so as we speak. To date, it has picked up more than 10 awards, including some Gold awards. The latest news is it has garnered a nomination at the very prestigious British Design & Art Direction Awards.

Tan Hong Ming In Love is a candid, very spontaneous, unscripted piece about a Chinese boy in love with a Malay girl. It will definitely remind you of Yasmin’s breakthrough film, Sepet, which was also about the romance between a Chinese guy and a Malay girl.

Click on the link below to watch the ad.

Midnight Eye has posed their annual readers poll for the best Japanese film of 2007, and the winner by a fair margin is Satoshi Kon‘s Paprika.  No complaints here; that film is a knock-out and should be canonized at some point for those putting together a docket of definitive feature-length anime cinema.  The top 10 below.

1. Paprika
2. Strawberry Shortcakes
3. Memories of Matsuko
4. Sukiyaki Western Django
5. Retribution
5. Tekkon Kinkreet (tie)
7. Noriko’s Dinner Table
8. I Just Didn’t Do It
8. Nightmare Detective (tie)
10. Glory to the Filmmaker!
10. Sakuran. (tie)

Surprising to see Hana and Dianipponjin so much further down the list (and below the somewhat tedious Glory to the Filmmaker!), but there you have it.

As Dave Hudson has prefaced to my Greencine interview with Stefan Ruzowitzky, the director/screenwriter of The Counterfeiters (nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Foreign Language Film category), the film is based on true events: “the Nazis planned to destabilize the American and British economies by flooding the markets with fake dollars and pounds.  And they enlisted prisoners in concentration camps to counterfeit the bills.  This presents a dark dilemma to the prisoners: cooperate and survive—or sabotage the project and possibly pay with their lives.”

I first reviewed this Mephistophelian dilemma at the Toronto International, skeptical that audiences would digest this bitter fare; but, I’ve been proven wrong.  Dave Hudson has gathered the most recent reviews upon the film’s theatrical release, most of which are thoughtfully argued.

Cross-published on The Evening Class.

Its no big secret around here at Twitch that we are huge supporter of genre films, whether its sci-fi, fantasy or horror and so by extension, its pretty cool to see the Saturn Awards giving these genre its due.  Since it was founded in 1972, the non-profit organization has been devoted to ”honoring, recognizing and promoting genre entertainment”.  Today, the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films has announced the nominations for the 34th installment.  300 leads out with 10 nods while Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix takes second most nods with 9.  What come as no surprise, Guillermo del Toro will receive the well-deserved George Pal Memorial Award in recognition of his imaginative works as a director within the fantasy/horror genre. You’ll find the complete list of the nominations below after the break or you can check it at the official site. 

The winners will be announced on June 24th.

Continue Reading "34th SATURN AWARDS Nominations Announced"...

Let it be known that I listen to my filmbuds. If Brian Darr—dispatching to The Greencine Daily from the Sundance Film Festival—says a documentary short is a “doozy”, my antennae quiver. “Doozy” is not a word you hear levied about every day with regard to documentary shorts; but, La Corona—co-directed by Isabel Vega and Amanda Micheli—deserves that accolade, among many others.

As Brian explains: “Here’s the only film I know where you’ll see a would-be beauty queen with a disturbing gang tattoo at the base of her thumb. Or one who gives her lesbian lover a smooch just before being paroled.”

So thanks to Brian’s recommendation, and the generosity of the DOC Film Institute’s free screenings of the Oscar-nominated documentaries and documentary shorts at the comfortably refurbished Sundance Kabuki, I’ve had the chance to watch this doozy of a documentary short. Not only an Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary Short, La Corona won an Honorable Mention in Short Filmmaking at last month’s Sundance. It chronicles a beauty pageant held as part of the celebration of Saint Mercedes in the largest women’s penitentiary in Bogota, Colombia.I had the opportunity to ask a question of Amanda Micheli (Double Dare) and to supplement it with a couple of follow-up questions from her Sundance Kabuki audience; our conversation is not for the spoiler-wary.

Continue Reading "LA CORONA—A Few Questions for Amanda Micheli"...

Tôkyô tawâ: Okan to boku to, tokidoki, oton dominated the Japanese Academy Awards winning in five categories. Also, good news for animation fans, Tekkon Kinkreet, won for best animated feature continuing to win animation awards around the world. And in the ‘It’s so crazy they might just believe it to be true” category, Letters From Iwo Jima, a movie with a whole lot of Japanese in it to begin with, won the best foreign film award. Uncanny.

See all the winners after the jump.

Continue Reading "‘Tokyo Tower’ takes home the hardware at Japan Academy Awards"...

“I need a bodyguard now. I came with a flower in the pocket, and I leave with a tiger in the pocket!”

Malaysian filmmaker Liew Seng Tat’s exact words after his debut feature film, Flower In The Pocket, was announced as one of three winners of the VPRO Tiger Awards at the 37th International Film Festival Rotterdam. The other two winning films are Aditya Assarat’s drama about the tsunami tragedy, Wonderful Town; and Omar Shargawi’s Go With Peace Jamil.

This year’s jury consisted of Singapore filmmaker Royston Tan, Russian actress and filmmaker Renata Litvinova, former deputy director of the Filmmuseum of Amsterdam Rieks Hadders, deputy director of the Locarno festival Tiziana Finzi, and Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi.

Wonderful Town was awarded for its “fresh perspective ... and unconventional ending”, Flower for its “excellent visual expression”, and Go With Peace for its “strong directing and acting work.”

A haunted house. An African immigrant. A traditional Malaysian village. Sounds like fun!

That’s the premise for Liew Seng Tat’s next feature film, In What City Does It Live?, which has just been awarded the Prince Claus Film Fund grant of Euro15,000. He describes the story as a “humorous approach to superstition and racism in a small Muslim village.” The fund is aimed at encouraging filmmaking in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Liew Seng Tat is probably the brightest new star of the Malaysian independent scene. His Flower In The Pocket won the top prize in Pusan and is currently in the VPRO Tiger Awards competition in Rotterdam. In the photo are Liew and producer Michelle Lo at the 25th CINEMART awards night.

Each year when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences officially announces their nominations, I momentarily wax nostalgic thinking back on the individuals I’ve had the chance to talk with in the preceding year who find themselves looking skyward at the starting gun.

This year in the category of Best Actor in a Leading Role, I sat down with Viggo Mortensen when he and David Cronenberg were in town promoting Eastern Promises.  He was thoroughly down to Earth and gave me an inscribed copy of one of his books.  Our conversation was published by Greencine on their main site.

In the category of Best Actress in a Leading Role, Omar Moore and I chatted it up with Laura Linney when she was in town promoting The Savages.  That conversation is up on Twitch.  I’m booked to interview Marion Cotillard this coming Tuesday and that interview has been optioned by Greencine.  I’ll advise when that goes up.

I drank coffee with Marjane Satrapi and interviewed Vincent Paronnaud, the co-creators of Persepolis, nominated for Best Animated Feature.  Both the Satrapi and the Paronnaud pieces are up on Twitch.

Continue Reading "2008 OSCARS—On Your Mark Red Ribbon Runners!!"...

Put together by the Toronto International Film Festival Group (TIFFG) Canada’s Top 10 was established a few years back as a way to issue press release that yea, Canada has a film industry outside of granting Hollywood studios tax breaks to film in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal.  This year almost the complete series of films were on display at TIFF and we managed to catch most of the shorts and features even.  While I would nominate Guy Maddin’s fabulously vitriolic, absurdist, surreal and downright hilarious My Winnipeg to just barely edge out David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, your mileage may vary.  Bruce McDonanld’s experimental split-screen Into The Night-type film, The Tracey Fragments, that stars future A-list actress Ellen Page is deserving of your love, especially because it only got the most limited release possible - a few rep cinemas in large Canadian cities (this is however, more than many of the films on the list though).  Also, a huge shout out to Madame Tutli-Putli on the short films list, which is a must see for lovers of existential surrealism and stop motion animation and a film we’ve pumped and stumped for a lot around here. Certainly, the two directors (Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski) responsible for this gorgeous 17 minute short film (Available for purchase from the National Film Board if you have a Canadian shipping address). With a single film, they have joined the ranks with Jan Svankmajer, Henry Selick and The Brothers Quay in terms of groundbreaking stop-motion work.

Like good little non-confrontational Canucks, the moderators of this list chose not to number or prioritize the films.  The unordered Top 10 lists of both Features and Short Films are after the jump.

Continue Reading "It’s List Time Again - Canada’s Top 10 for 2007"...

News just in that Liew Seng Tat’s feature debut, the digital family dramedy, Flower In The Pocket, picked up the New Currents Award at the Pusan International Film Festival. The press release goes:

Liew Seng Tat’s debut film FLOWER IN THE POCKET won the Pusan Int Film Festival’s New Currents Award and the KNN Audience Award.

It shares the New Currents Award with 2 other films - LIFE TRACK (Jin Guang Hao, China/Korea) and WONDERFUL TOWN (Aditya Assarat, Thailand). PIFF this year increased the number of New Currents Award from one to three.

The New Currents jury comprised Dariush Mehrjui (Head of Jury, Iran), Nan Yu (Actress, China), Cristian Mungiu (Director), Goran Paskaljevic (Director) and Lee Chang-dong (Director).

A lot of the Asian markets have chosen their champions to enter the fray of Best Foreign Film contention for this year’s Oscars. And as the deadline looms on October 1st a lot has happened in the last couple weeks. Here’s the breakdown so far…

Hong Kong just announced Johnnie To’s “Exiled” will be their entry. I am not afraid to admit this film makes me weep at parts. It is fantastic.

“Donsol” by Adolfo Alix Jr. has been selected to represent the Philippines. The movie is about two lonely people who find refuge in Donsol, a small fishing town and a popular tourist destination for whale shark spotting.

“I Just Didn’t Do It” (Soredemo boku wa yattenai), Masayuki Suo’s courtroom drama, will be Japan’s entry this year.

South Korea has selected Lee Chang-dong’s “Secret Sunshine”, a story about a young widow who moves from Seoul to start over in a provincial city. I am sorry I missed this one at TIFF this year. Just too popular.

Royston Tan’s “881” has been selected to represent Singapore. The film is set in the gaudy and bizarre world of “getai” and features a particularly Singaporean style of music played to please seasonal ghosts.

Bangladesh has picked “Swopnodonay” (On the Wings of Dreams) from tyro director Golam Rabbany Biplob. The film is about a peddler of herbal remedies who finds foreign currency in a pair of second-hand pants and how it changes relationships around him.

India has gone with “Eklavya: The Royal Guard” from Vidhu Vinod Chopra. The film stars Amitabh Bachchan as the so-called guard who protects a contemporary Indian royal family and its dark secrets.

Thoughts? Are these the right choices based on what you know of these films?