ferment/// videograms for your daily revolutions

Limbunan Trailer

2010-06-08T19:41:00.002+08:00

The first feature narrative of filmmaker Gutierrez Mangansakan II and part of the 6th Cinemalaya Film Festival

Limbunan Trailer from malikmata.digital on Vimeo.

Sakay sa Hangin (Windblown) Official Trailer

2010-06-08T13:19:00.007+08:00

The upcoming film from filmmaker and brilliant cinematographer Regiben Romana of the Philippine Islands.

After a year of shooting in the highlands of Taalandig country and the streets of Manila, Regiben Romana is finally pushing toward finishing this promising "Documentary Musicale".

The film features the music and culture of Talaandig Artist Waway Saway.

lihok flai

2010-03-07T17:19:00.002+08:00

lihok flai from street konect on Vimeo.

1:27min, 2009
By street konect

Inspired by blu.

ARTiculation

2010-03-05T10:53:00.005+08:00

Visual Pond launches ARTiculation, a Philippine contemporary art series

Created and produced by Visual Pond, ARTiculation is a series on contemporary artists from the Philippines. The only series of its kind locally and consisting of ten videos released online throughout the year, each episode features an artist talking about his/her body of work such as themes, influences and motivations. The series, shot and edited with a low budget, aims to be a critical and easily accessible resource for curators, writers, students, academics and anyone who wants to learn more about contemporary artists from the Philippines. A catalogue featuring the ten artists will be made available at the end of the year. For foreign audiences, Visual Pond will eventually be releasing English transcripts.

For the first episode, Visual Pond is delighted to feature Mark Salvatus. Born 1980 and a BFA Advertising Arts cum laude graduate from the University of Santo Tomas, Salvatus is interested in urban and community-based art as demonstrated in street art, the Wrapped project, the Accidental Contemporary Art series and blogging. He has participated in a number of international residencies such as the Asia Cultural Artist Residency (Gwangju, Korea), the Shatana International Residency (Shatana, Irbid, Jordan) and the Can Serrat Centro de Actividades Artisticas (Barcelona, Spain). He will soon be going to Melbourne, Australia as an artist for the Next Wave Festival 2010.

To watch the first episode, please go to the following links:

S01E01 Mark Salvatus
Part 1/3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4oxLKpipkc
Part 2/3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVxWCFND0QQ
Part 3/3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HCTpOPjpiE

More information on Mark Salvatus at his blog http://marksalvatus.blogspot.com/

ARTiculation © 2010, Visual Pond Artspace, Inc.
Series Director: Clarissa Chikiamco
Executive Producers and Curators: Clarissa Chikiamco & Rica Estrada
Associate Producers: Cheska Tanada & Tenten Mina
Series Coordinator: Rica Estrada
All images courtesy and copyright of Mark Salvatus
Music by and courtesy of Aljar3D http://www.myspace.com/dnbjared
ARTiculation logo by Cheska Tanada

-----------------------------
Subscribe to the Visual Pond youtube channel: www.youtube.com/user/visualpond
Visual Pond website: http://visualpond.multiply.com/
Visual Pond Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/#%21/group.php?gid=321716607895&ref=ts
To remove your email from the emailing list, please send an email to visualpond@gmail.com with 'Remove email' as the subject line.

Visual Pond Artspace, Inc. is a non-profit organization committed to the visual arts. Based in Manila, Visual Pond aims to be a dynamic player in the Philippine contemporary art scene through projects that engage and promote local artists both here and abroad. We at Visual Pond envision a contemporary art scene that is vibrant, open to experimentation and supported by the community. By taking initiatives and creating opportunities for Filipino artists, we work towards this realization for the visual arts locale.

Asides from Manila-based projects, we are also interested in regional and international exchanges on ideas, concepts and possible collaborations with definite end products.

SDP's Let's Talk

2009-11-04T14:04:00.004+08:00

The Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) are now producing Singapore's first internet talkshow, Let's Talk. Coincidentally, the SDP gained internet-notoriety just a few years ago when Martyn See produced Singapore Rebel which prominently featured SDP honcho Chee Soon Juan.

The inaugural episode features Alex Au, one of the most prominent bloggers in Singapore and author of the Yawningbread.org. Au is also one of the leaders of gay rights activist group People Like Us.

The second episode features writer and social activist Constance Singam. Singam has been a longtime advocate for women's rights and, unsurprisingly, she's also a blogger: http://connie.sg/

For future episodes, check the SDP's YouTube channel.

Links:
SDP: website, YouTube channel
People Like Us: website, Wiki
Connie Singam

Asian Film Archive

2009-10-27T15:01:00.001+08:00

From Bee Thiam of the Asian Film Archive:

Dear friends,

As part of our education and outreach efforts, the Asian Film Archive is, for the first time, launching an online campaign to generate greater awareness of the importance and urgency of saving Asia’s film heritage. In line with UNESCO’s message on World Day for Audiovisual Heritage to save a fading heritage, the Archive hopes that this series of videos will reach out to the public as well as film communities with the vital message on the need to properly and adequately preserve their filmic works.

Released on YouTube, these part informational and part tongue-in-cheek videos will be released online periodically. Two videos have already been uploaded onto the Archive's YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/AsianFilmArchive), as well as on its Facebook group.

Through these videos, the Archive hopes to generate the realisation in filmmakers on how urgent it is to archive their works early as they become aware of the fragility of their creative works physical shelf life when stored improperly.

Asian Film Archive
The Asian Film Archive is a non-governmental organisation founded to preserve the rich film heritage of Asian Cinema, to encourage scholarly research on film, and to promote a wider critical appreciation of this art form. As an important nexus, it brings together the various segments of the Asian film community in order to open and enrich new intellectual, educational and creative spaces.

Best,
Bee Thiam
Director, Asian Film Archive

E: info@asianfilmarchive.org
W: www.asianfilmarchive.org
Blog: http://www.asianfilmarchive.org/Blog/
Pictures from In Conversation With Filmmakers: http://www.flickr.com/photos/36088625@N06/show/

Eloi Hernandez interviews Ed Cabagnot

2009-10-25T14:21:00.001+08:00

From Eloi's blog:

A Conversation with Ed Cabagnot

While doing my research on digital cinema in the Philippines, it was inevitable that I talk to Ed Cabagnot. Here's an excerpt of our conversation where Ed shares his experience with the ECP and the early years of Gawad CCP.

I worked with Ed in the early 1990s, he's at the CCP Film while I was with the CCP Visual Arts and then CCP Outreach. I learned a lot about films and photography from him. One afternoon, passing through Ed's office I saw him watching a film, I stopped and joined him. I was enthralled, completely awed and fell in love. The film was Raise the Red Lantern by Zhang Yimou. Unfortunately, I had a meeting to go to and I was not able to finish the film. But the images stayed with me. I was fortunate to finally finish the film a few years back. I am still in love with it. Thank you, Ed.

EH: I’m very interested in your first-hand experience in the GAWAD CCP, Freefest and Cinemalaya. Please take us back in time.

ED: My first statement is that Cinemalaya is one of the most successful projects of the Cultural Center of the Philippines to date in the sense that audience-wise even if we did not have press release, people came and the screenings get filled up. So audience-wise, every year people flock to watch Cinemalaya films. Number two, revenue-wise it is also one of the most lucrative CCP projects. In the past year Cinemalaya earned 27.5 million pesos in ticket sales, compared to the first year which was barely 5 million -- so you can see the trajectory. And I’m not saying “kasi ang galing- galing ng CCP,” I’m just saying that the time is right. We have a lot of people making new films. We have a lot of audiences who are looking for films and then we have a venue like CCP which is giving these people the space.

My statement there is that the success of Cinemalaya wasn’t overnight. The road to Cinemalaya was a long, long road and I think if you will allow me, I think it even goes beyond CCP. For me, from my experience, I think the first stirring of this movement was called Philippine Independent filmmaking which started as early, even before the 80’s. My first hand experience with the indies was working under the Experimental Cinema of the Philippines. So I can bring you back -- this was created by the Marcos administration in February 1982 to be the managing organization of Imelda’s Manila Film Center. So the ECP was created to create film-related events that can push Philippine cinema forward. So on one side of the ECP was Imelda’s MIFF - Manila International Film Festival – whose main goal was to make Manila the Cannes of Asia, the Cannes Film Festival of Asia. On the other side of CCP was Imee. Imee was tasked by Marcos to create the other incentives. And what were the other incentives? Other incentives included a film fund which means if you have a film in production but cannot finish it due to financial difficulties, you can show your rushes and then the ECP would give you the balance. And then there were film production which was responsible for four of the best films I know – Oro, Plata, Mata, Himala, Soltero, Misterio sa Tuwa. And then you have the archives headed ni Ernie De Pedro. It was a beautiful archives below. And then you have Film Education of Ward Loarca but that did not really take off.

And then where I was, was the Alternative Cinema. Alternative Cinema’s job was just to fill up all the theatres of the Manila Film Center and we had more than 13 theatres with regular screenings. The main theatre of the Manila Film Festival Center could seat approximately 1,800 people. The 2 smaller theaters were big; they were as big as the Little Theater – 450-seater and a 350-seater. And then you have the mini preview rooms which could sit 100 people to 300 people. So that was our job.

My boss before was Boy Noriega. So doon sa Alternative Cinema, I was handling the classic films - the Renoirs, Truffauts, Kurosawas, the Fellinis, etc. And then somebody else was handling the Filipino titles. And then somebody else was handling the independent films. For me, it all started with the ECP Independent Film and Video Competition. It started, if I’m not mistaken, in 1982. Bienvenido “Boy” Noriega Jr., the playwright, inspired it. He was also a bank vice president for PNB, but at the same time he was an officer of ECP, and he was an author. He loved short films, he loved classic movies, so he was the one with Imee, who thought of coming up with a competition. So the ECP Experimental Cinema and Independent Film & Video competition became the first ever regular competition sponsored by the government that gave young Filipino filmmakers awards for the best documentary, best short feature or narrative film, best experimental and best animation - so the 4 categories were there. The likes of Nick Deocampo, Raymond Red, Joey Agbayani, Rox Lee and a host of other people who many consider as the pillars of Philippine Independent Cinema became known here. And I remember we were all young then, they were programming the festival, we were all joining the festival, and it was fun.

EDSA People Power happened in 1986 and one of the first things that the new administration did was shut down most of the Marcos’s machineries. Unfortunately, I felt it was very relentless. They should have kept the ones that worked and I felt that the ECP was one of the best efforts of the government, but unfortunately they shut it down. Manila Film Center was closed. CCP changed its thrust. You know that Eloi, you were from here - decentralization, etc. They opened CCP to include the non-performing arts so the VLMA (Visual Literary Media Arts) was formed and Hammy Sotto became the head for Film. They wanted the CCP not just a venue but also a Coordinating Center.

So when Hammy came in, he asked me to join him. To be honest, I did not want to work with government anymore but Hammy is a nice guy and said. “Don’t worry Ed, we’ll have as much fun as you did in ECP.” When I joined CCP, most of the projects/programs that we did at the ECP were adopted by the CCP. But of course, CCP’s budget is much smaller than ECP’s - you know all of a sudden arts and culture fell into nothingness. You were here, you know how our budgets were, but we did very good projects. One of the projects that had a reincarnation was the ECP Independent Film and Video Competition that was renamed GAWAD CCP para sa Alternatibong Pelikula at Video.

Hammy was so wise. He didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, so the Coordinating Center for Film in 1987 was patterned after the ECP but on a very, very small scale. I managed World Cinema. Lyn Pareja managed Filipino Greats. And then you had Jon Red who was managing the Indie film. So Jon Red was in-charged of GAWAD CCP para sa Alternatibong Pelikula at Video. And what was nice even though there was one or two years gap between the end of ECP and the start of Coordinating Center for Film, when we started the GAWAD there was a smooth transition. A lot of people joined like Mark Leily, they all joined. To be honest with you, even the exact rules and regulations of the GAWAD was based on the ECP.

EH: So this was about ‘88?

ED: ‘87. The good then thing is we felt that the ECP pattern was good, so why re-invent it? That’s the problem with Filipino, when there’s a change in management, everything changes. That’s why I like Hammy because he is not like that, for him it was “let’s just do this because it was good in the first place.” So the categories survived up to now.

The GAWAD CCP para sa Alternatibong Pelikula at Video is one of the longest running GAWAD of the Cultural Center of the Philippines. But Eloi, please help me with this research, it’s my claim that “it is the longest running Independent Film Festival in Asia.” There’s no other independent competition, especially for shorts, that I know existed in countries including Japan or even India. So if you could help me with that claim. But at least for Southeast Asia I know we were first and we’re still there.

So yung Independent Cinema scene I think, if you just look at all the winners of the GAWAD, you would see the trending, you would see the themes and technologies that were the trend for certain periods.

EH: Were you able to keep the films?

Ed: No. We only started archiving the films between 20 years, during the 10th or 11th year. But the nice thing is most of the entries of the GAWAD CCP came from Mowelfund, UP, Ateneo, La Salle and most of these schools would have their archives. Unfortunately, I just found out from Ricky Orellana that even Mowelfund is having a hard time archiving their shorts. They still have but they need the funding and the people to maintain it, digitize it - so that’s the problem.

EH: What about your catalogs?

ED: The catalogs are almost complete in the CCP library. And for the 20th anniversary (of CCP), Ricky and I had been talking about having some of the Mowelfund shorts digitized using CCP equipment. Because we feel that we own it partly because they’re GAWAD winners. And as I’ve said, young people nowadays especially they’re going into independent filmmaking, it’s nice for them to realize that they are not alone - a lot of people started before them.

EH: That they’re not “putok sa buho?”

ED: Exactly. For me, that’s one of the ways we can help them. There are a lot of independent filmmakers who are big-headed; they think they are always the first to do things, which I don’t mind, it’s nice to have a big ego but if you feel like you’re a part of a tradition, then that’s better.

Part 2 to follow.

Cultural Center of the Philippines May 14, 2009

Today in Southeast Asian film history: 23 October 1968

2009-10-23T21:21:00.002+08:00

41 years ago, Gema Dari Menara, Brunei Darussalam's first feature film premiered at the New Boon Pang Theatre, Brunei Town (now called Bandar Seri Begawan).

Above is Gema Dari Menara's screening schedule which appeared in the classified ads section of The Borneo Bulletin, 19 October 1968, p.23. Below is the full page it appeared in (which is quite interesting in its own right):

For the Lav of it: “Fuck profit motive in cinema!”

2009-10-16T23:59:00.002+08:00

Lav Diaz struck by incurable stage fright? Must be melancholia. So he got frequent collaborator, actress Angeli Bayani, to read a little something he wrote for the Italian Film Festival in Manila, October 14, 2009. I shall say no more. Below is the entire speech reposted from the Encantos blog:

A Speech for the 8th Italian Film Festival

By Lav Diaz

This piece will not be long. I timed it. It shall be just two minutes.

Okay, it will be a little bit longer. I am writing this piece in a very organic way, no apologies-stream of consciousness manner. This is free cinema.

I hate speeches to be very honest. Besides an incurable stage freight, I would rather much prefer to just play guitar with my back behind the crowd or be behind the camera than talk in front of people who would just be hearing another fool’s hyperbole and self-important chatter.

I received this request to deliver a speech here as a guest of honor.

What on earth is a guest of honor? Have you checked my background? The Board of Censors here in the Philippines banned my films, my two films that won at the Orizzonti of the Venice Film Festival. There’s nudity and sex, they said. Without proper critical viewing of my films by the honorable members of the Board of Censors, they deemed the films not appropriate for viewing here in their country of origin. They banned other works, too. And lately, they have been encroaching on the freedom of venues like the Adarna Theatre of the University of the Philippines. Benito Mussolini must be very proud.

I’ll say it again. Censorship is poison to cinema. Censorship is poison to the arts. Censorship is poison to culture. Censorship is a very feudal act. It is fascism.

The invitation also says that I should talk about my Venice experience. So, here’s a piece from a Filipino independent pornography filmmaker.

First, I would like to congratulate the 8th edition of the Italian Film Festival here in our beloved battered Philippines.

The Venice Film Festival or the Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica di Venezia is the Mother of film festivals. It is the oldest film festival in the world. This tradition of mounting film festivals had its beginning in Venice, Italy in 1932. In 1952, the first Filipino film to compete, Manuel Conde’s Genghis Khan, exhibited in Venice. In 1985, Mike de Leon’s Sister Stella L. was shown at the festival. And in 2007, my film Death in the Land of Encantos competed and won Special Mention at the Orizzonti section of the festival. The following year, in 2008, my film Melancholia, competed in the same section and won the Orizzonti Prize. This year, Briliante Mendoza’s Lola was a Philippine entry at the Main Competition and Pepe Diokno’s Engkwentrocoveted two prizes, the Orizzonti Prize and the Luigi di Laurentii Lion of the Future Prize. Despite the dearth of our participation in the seventy six years existence of the Mostra, only six films to date, we have had a very triumphant and respectable run. Long live, Philippine cinema, indeed! And I would like to point out that despite the absence of state support in our cultural struggle, in the state’s sheer ignorance on the very important role of the arts in educating our people, cultural workers, especially artists and activists, persevere in pursuing greater discourse and praxis in this vast wasteland called the Philippines.

A Venice attendance is every filmmaker’s dream. If you are into aesthetic exercise, world cinema offers a load of great and incendiary works. And if you have celebrity skin, Hollywood’s killer vanity and fashion’s hallucinatory sheen is just everywhere. You can check the stately hotel where Thomas Mann wrote Death in Venice. A walk in Venice is a time machine ride with its old structures, art centers and canals. A boat ride is a rock ‘n roll experience.

More than the festivities and the city, Italy gave the world its great cinema culture. Roberto Rossellini, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Vittorio de Sica, Ermanno Olmi, Bernardo Bertolucci, Sergio Leone. That venerable list is continued by modern auteurs like Gianni Amelio, Giuseppe Tornatore, Marco Bellocchio, Paolo Sorrentino, Gabriele Salvatores and a lot more.

Italian cinema has given us many of the greatest models and paradigms--Open City, Paisan, Stromboli, L’Avventura, La Notte, L’eclisse, The Leopard, The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 8 ½, La Dolce Vita, Umberto D., Bicycle Thief, The Conformist, The Tree of Wooden Clogs, L’America. These works are incomparable masterpeices. These works set the standard by which the greater aesthetic discourse in cinema will continue to be measured upon till cinema is not dead. Yes, cinema will not die. We have Italian Cinema. Cinema will not die, we have Philippine cinema.

In one interview, Antonioni said: "I would not want to say. Or perhaps I do not know."

And I want to say this, allow me please: “Fuck profit motive in cinema!”

We just hope that this year’s edition will measure up to the greater tradition of cinema.

I will forever honor the memory of the great martyr, Alexis Tioseco… for the struggle toward a greater Philippine Cinema. Nika Bohinc will forever be in our hearts.

Again, mabuhay to the 8th year of the Italian Film Festival.

Salamat po.

(Read by Angeli Bayani, lead actress of Death in the Land of Encantos and Melancholia, during the Opening Ceremonies of the 8th Italian Film Festival in Manila, October 14, 2009)

------------------
Kudos, Encantos!

Review: At The End of Daybreak

2009-10-16T23:05:00.002+08:00

At The End of Daybreak sees Ho Yuhang and Pete Teo continuing their creative collaboration after the success of Rain Dogs (2006) and the very recent 15Malaysia project. Yuhang's latest opus has him back in his usual cinematic mode, long-takes and all--which is far from the quirky comedy of his 15Malaysia contribution, Potong Saga.

Koreanfilm.org's Darcy Paquet reviews this film for Screen Daily:

Dir/scr: Ho Yuhang. Malaysia/HK/S Korea. 2009. 94 mins.

Malaysian director Ho Yuhang trades in the languid, long-take aesthetic of his early career for something more kinetic in At the End of Daybreak, an intriguing portrait of an adolescent affair gone wrong. The film should help to cement Ho’s position at the forefront of Malaysia’s art-house renaissance, though its noir-ish conclusion lacks the punch that could have made it a knockout. Wide festival exposure and Ho’s reputation should translate into modest commercial sales and a lengthy afterlife on DVD.

Vivid characters and a briskly paced, slightly experimental editing style help to maintain viewers’ attention

The film, which premiered in Locarno, has been sold to several Southeast Asian territories and may yet add a few European deals before it is finished. Vivid characters and a briskly paced, slightly experimental editing style help to maintain viewers’ attention, though it will be marketed primarily on its arthouse qualities.
The plot centers around an immature 23-year-old man named Tuck Chai (Chui Tien-you) who remains very much under the spell of his domineering, alcoholic mother (Wai Ying-hong). Through the internet he meets and starts a sexual affair with schoolgirl Ying (Ng Meng-hui), who feels stifled by the oppressive atmosphere at her home and school.

However when Ying’s mother discovers birth control pills in her room, she threatens to charge Tuck Chai with statutory rape. As his mother scrambles to raise cash for a settlement, turning to her estranged husband, an increasingly desperate Tuck Chai convinces Ying to meet him in person one last time.

The film’s first ten minutes are a show of editing bravura, with disorienting leaps from character to character that vaguely echo 1920s-era Soviet montage. However the focus quickly comes to rest on the characters of Tuck Chai and Ying, who inhabit very different social worlds (Ying studies piano, while our first view of Tuck Chai sees him pour boiling water over a rat in a cage).

Ho is skilled at fleshing out his characters with interesting details and evocative lines of dialogue. Tuck Chai is in equal parts repulsive for his cowardly behavior and sympathetic for his awkward boyishness, leaving viewers unsure what to think of him.

Towards its end the film takes an unexpected violent turn (mostly occurring offscreen), and a darker, less urgent aesthetic takes over. The plot twist brings some surprises, but it also simplifies the story and removes some of the restless energy that made earlier reels so interesting.

Acting is solid throughout, with Chui’s performance ranging from inarticulate silence to sudden, unplanned outbursts of emotion. Ng’s face is harder to read, but as the relationship goes sour a callous streak in her character’s personality becomes apparent. Meanwhile Wai Ying-hong is particularly memorable as Tuck Chai’s tough minded mother who wields power over her son but can’t control her own drinking problem.
Nervous movement characterises Teoh Gay-hian’s cinematography, with the camera moving up close to the characters and rarely standing still. The film’s distinctive visual style is one of its clear strengths. Singer Pete Teo’s eclectic score ranges from solo piano to Japanese pop to a cappella voices reciting songs and prayers.

107Malaysia: Ong Tee Keat's thoughts on 15Malaysia

2009-10-11T22:43:00.003+08:00

The Malaysian politicos sure like their YouTube:

Well... Okay lah, Mr. Malaysian Transport Minister. I will add you as my Facebook friend. Kudos to your media adviser!

Links:
YouTube URL
107Malaysia
Ong Tee Keat: website, Wiki (Malay), Wiki (English), YouTube channel, Facebook

107Malaysia: Ne...???

2009-10-11T22:24:00.004+08:00

So after 15Malaysia there's 107Malaysia. And from that we get cute Malaysian nationalist stuff like this:

Nice one, froggychua! But I wonder if they'd get to let us download stuff like this just like with the 15Malaysia stuff...

The 107Malaysia blah:
15Malaysia is as much about you as it is about us. You can join us simply by making your own film about the country we all love. Your film will be displayed on this page if you follow the instructions on the sidebar. When your uploaded film is displayed here, our page title will change to reflect the inclusion of your film in our project!

Instructions:

Format.
You may shoot your film with anything from 35mm film camera to your mobile phone. Your story is important. Not the equipment. Try keeping it to no longer than 5 minutes if you can.
Story.
Your film can be about the pothole outside your house, the dirty drain next to your school, the favorite Malaysian food and so on. Whatever it is, it must be about Malaysia.
Respect.
Malaysia is made up of different cultures and communities. We believe that all Malaysians should respect each other’s cultural differences. So please do not shoot anything offensive to anyone’s culture or religion or way of life. Our video display area is moderated.
Upload & Tag.
When you have made your film, simply upload to YOUTUBE and tag it with the tag ‘15MY’ (without the quotes). Then wait 24 hours while we find your film and display it on this page.
Recommended.
If your film impresses us, it will be listed in our recommended section so that everyone can find it easily.

I like this strategy. Interesting nationalist propaganda ploy. But what if a "non-Malaysian" makes a decent 107Malaysia short? Would they include it? And where's the stuff from Sabah and Sarawak?! Hmmm....

Links:
107Malaysia
YouTube URL
Chua S. Min/froggychua: YouTube channel, day job

Floods of Manila

2009-10-06T20:39:00.009+08:00

Here's a very current take on the situation in post-Ondoy/Ketsana Manila by Filipino artist-activist Jong Pairez via EngageMedia:

Video information:

Produced & Directed by Jong Pairez

Contact: write the producer

Produced: 2009/09/27

Production Company: scamproductions

Distributor: scam distro

Duration: 3 minutes 22 seconds

In 2006, the Philippine Government activated the long dead Mining Act to encourage multi-nationals in giving mining industry a big come back in the archipelago. Resulting to a numerous tragedy including landslides, flash floods and many other unimaginable calamities that killed thousands of people and devastated all livelihoods. Despite all this, nobody was held accountable to these horrible tragedies. Recently (September 26, 2009), a big typhoon struck Metro Manila and flooded the whole metropolis for the first time. And still nobody is accountable to this horrible tragedy.

Embed:

Download Hi-Res / Screening Version (170.7 MB)

Videos best viewed on VLC player

Links:
Jong Pairez: website, Multiply, Facebook,
Help, donate, support: Ondoy Relief
Typhoon Ondoy
Ondoy, You Fucking Asshole

This is Just a Fuck Film: Noritoshi Hirakawa Polemicizes an Orgy

2009-10-06T03:17:00.007+08:00

by David Frazier

This clip was edited from a talk on Sep. 12 by Noritoshi Hirakawa, a Japanese, New York-based artist and producer of a controversial art-porn video called "Water in Milk Exists." You will see that some in the audience at this screening in a Taipei art gallery were ready to take issue with the video. Among them was Manray Hsu, an independent curator and critic who served as co-curator of the 2008 Taipei Biennial and 2006 Liverpool Biennial. Before watching the clip, that may be all you really need to know. After seeing it though, you'll probably be interested in the following, which offers a little more background on the critical fireworks as well as - and this is the reason I'm asking you to hold off - my own strong opinion on the video which I'm airing here for the first time.

As for the basics, "Water in Milk Exists" is a 22-minute work of video art by Lawrence Weiner, who at the age of 67 is considered a legendary New York conceptual artist who first made his name showing in the Leo Castelli Gallery alongside the likes of Andy Warhol. I think it's fair to say that he's also an aging hippie. Hirakawa, who was instrumental as the video's producer, is of a younger generation and known for photos which blur the lines between art and hentai porn genres like upskirts and voyeurism.

As to the work itself, here's how Art Forum described it: "This nonnarrative porn is full of twenty-somethings fucking, sucking, playing, and masturbating in the Swiss Institute’s SoHo loft and a Chinatown photo studio. Scenes alternate between often-thrilling hardcore porn and contrived and tedious philosophical musings about 'personal definitions of reality' and 'string theory.' Like a switch flicked too soon, stimulation teasingly turns on and off." (Read the entire review.)

As one would expect, Art Forum is being generous. Instead of value judgments, we get pseudo-theory. Now I realize most reading this post haven't seen the film - there's way too many blowjobs for it to ever go on YouTube, and like Noritoshi says, it's not the monkey-spanking material ( OGC ) of porn sites. And even if it did go online, it'd probably be labeled something like "Phenomenological Group Orgy" (2.5 stars) and be impossible to find.

But evaluating works like "Water..." is important, and there are very important things people are not saying about it. In other words, there is an 800-pound gorilla in the living room, and it has to do with this: Knowning what the creators are only too happy to explain to us about this work -- that all of the orgy participants in fact work in galleries or other art institutions -- it's hard not to see "Water..." as an unintentional metaphor for the New York art world. The filming is bad, the sound is bad, and the concepts are hopelessly confused. What we are left with is a bunch of people in a white room fucking each other and parroting bad philosophy. Yes, there were bigger ideas there, but whether "Water..." is measured as video art or film, the creators didn't have the skill to bring them across. So what you get if you bother to watch nothing more than a big circle jerk, both literally and intellectually. One can only suppose that this is what the entire New York art scene was doing before the art market crashed last winter. Boo hoo. Fuck me harder.

Hirakwa's points from the Q&A clip may still be valid, but I think he can really only defend this idea of "freedom to experience one's pleasure in public" through his photographs, where he has a very delicate touch. For the moment, I'll let the photos speak for themselves. Here are a few examples:

"D-T, Nakano" from the series "Dreams of Tokyo" (1991)

"The Reason of Life - Iris"(1997)

"The Reason of Life - Iris"(1997)

Mutant Media: Essays on Cinema, Video Art and New Media by John Conomos

2009-10-05T12:11:00.020+08:00

A review of Mutant Media: Essays on Cinema, Video Art and New Media, by John Conomos (Artspace and Power Publications, Sydney, 2007), from Senses of Cinema:

“In Between” the Moving Image

Mutant Media:
Essays on Cinema, Video Art and New Media
by John Conomos

review by Sean Lowry

With an interest in cinema tracing back to the 1960s, an involvement in video and new media art since the 1980s, coupled with a deep understanding of shifting tendencies in criticism and theory, Australian artist, critic and writer John Conomos is inimitably placed to examine transgeneric relationships in moving image culture. Drawing upon filmmakers and theorists, video and new media artists, cultural theorists and philosophers past and present, Mutant Media: Essays on Cinema, Video Art and New Media is an innovatory and speculative exploration of historical, contemporary and potential interactions between cinema, art, poetry, criticism and technology. Framing much of his material around filmmaker and theorist Jean-Luc Godard, Conomos is a champion of artists, filmmakers and theorists that refuse conventional dialectical boundaries. From Alfred Hitchcock to Chris Marker to Jeffrey Shaw, the terrain covered in this series of essays is expansive. Unlike some new media writers, Conomos is particularly interested in ideas that do not set newer developments in moving image culture against cinema, but conversely, see cinema as a device with which to understand variations of the moving image as they mutate across the “borders of media”. This thinking through cinema becomes a useful device for reconsidering the idea of cinema. In this context, apocalyptic or utopian calls for the end of cinema can be seen as paradoxically dependent upon the idea of cinema. In itself a hybrid formation, Conomos demonstrates cinema’s potential to mutate, as a reflection of, and in reaction to, newer technologies and cultural contexts. For Conomos, cinema is a political, phenomenological, existential, self-reflexive and an experimental medium. Throw the inextricable historical influence of the still image into the mix, consider the unresolved collision of poetry and anti-aesthetic criticism, introduce video and interactive computer technologies, acknowledge the literary and philosophical underpinnings of our moving image culture, and you will have some sense of the rich playground that is Mutant Media.

Working upon the ideas of French critic and theorist Raymond Bellour, Conomos suggests that the introduction of newer forms of screen-based new media do not necessarily present a challenge to the idea of cinema but are perhaps instead evidence that it is alive and mutating across and through time and remediated technologies. Musing upon the paradoxically closed-minded claims of those who call for the “death” or “end” of incarnations with which they are clearly only specifically familiar, Conomos calls for a speculative, experimental and interconnected relationship with and between all forms of screen-based media. There is no need to throw any babies out with their proverbial bathwaters. We might instead find small “t” truths floating within the spaces “in between”. Conomos is less interested in ideas that parade a wholesale rejection of the idea of cinema than a fluid rethinking of its definitions and parameters in relationship to emerging technologies and cultural paradigms. For Conomos, there is not one single notion of cinema, but rather many disparate, criss-crossing and intertwining ones. Reminding us that even cinema in its classical form is in itself a hybrid formation, Conomos demonstrates that the “in between” is a fertile space. Personally predisposed to moving “in between” – being Greek and Australian, a cinephile and a video artist, a poet and a theorist, an artist and a writer, a practitioner and an educator – Conomos joins the company of thinkers that inspire reconsideration of perceived oppositionalities. At its rare best, Australia is a place that can capitalise on being midway between the primary cultural exporters of North America, Europe and now Asia. As a cultural importer, it is occasionally capable of hybridising derivative cultural formations, producing works, ideas and observations not necessarily possible within perceived centres. Not that its imported cultural infrastructure will typically be ready to recognise or support these rare moments, however. It is a theme long played out, variously implied withinMutant Media, and that might now sadly be extended to this exceptional book itself.

For Conomos, the oft-alleged dichotomy between cinema and other formations of moving image culture (such as television, video, the Internet, virtual reality and video installation) is not really worth sustaining. Surely all can comfortably coexist as different interfaces for complementary ideas? Despite the claims of its various factions, it is probable that the expanded field of moving image culture actually exists as a consequence of the unresolved tension between its many antithetical constructions. If we do indeed exist within a post-movement, post-disciplinary era, we must be capable of transcending the factional residue of such divides. Does art, in its broadest sense, not exist as an interface for certain forms of human expression precisely because it can communicate ideas that exist outside of more conventional forms of language or expression? It is finally as pointless to pit cinema against so-called new media as it is to pit poetic aesthetics against the politically-charged criticality of so-called anti-aesthetic cultural formations. Like art, cinema is read against a shifting balance of symbolic, strategic, perceptive, technical, cognitive, social, political, semantic, and ideological concerns. Cinema is alive and mutating as both a form and as an idea within the plurality of contemporary cultural production.

There is clearly no longer one dominant or uniquely relevant theory or tendency, nor much common ground between theories or tendencies. Every attempt to forward a critical totalitarianism masquerading as an antidote or utopia has fallen prey to paradox. In recent decades, the arts have become increasingly resistant to medium- or discipline-specific categorisation. Newer forms of categorisation, framed in terms of critical and conceptual genealogies, have given rise, for better or worse, to language that spans former disciplinary divides. Contemporary culture is produced and interpreted against a constantly shifting balance of symbolic, strategic, perceptive, technical, cognitive, social, political, semantic, poetic and ideological concerns. It is clearly intellectually irresponsible to attempt a description of moving image culture within any single paradigm. Conomos avoids this trap beautifully, instead dancing in a sometimes-autobiographical mode though the wealth of observations, anecdotes and quotations that have informed his creative life.

For the poet, a reduction of an appreciation of the arts to a “text” to be “read” and decoded, although useful, is finally unsatisfactory. The landscape that we actually inhabit is thankfully somewhere “in between” polarities such as theory and practice. For thinkers such as Conomos, as an artist and a writer, such polarities are not opponents but rather companions. Criticism that can confidently poke its head above this landscape must display an awareness of its internal contradictions without being constipated or consumed by its theoretical baggage. For Conomos, answers are floating and intriguingly unresolvable. It is an old cliché, but it is the questions that remain important. After all, this is subject matter fraught with contradiction, from the paradoxical stillness of the movie image, to the photographic image itself, which of course simultaneously captures reality yet holds it distant.

Reduced in parts to a series of quotes, lists of practitioners, and a generous use of analogy, Conomos wants to reveal his arguments to the reader, not declare their authority. Like his exemplars and protagonists, Conomos is poetically consistent. His is a style of writing which is potentially rewarding or frustrating depending on whether the reader is comfortable within the inconclusive and contradictory worlds that the essays inhabit and reflect. Like art itself, it leads the reader toward multiple interpretations or postulations rather than to neatly framed formations that are resistant to difference. Such an approach is less about any dilution of scholarly consistency than the text engaging with the inherently slippery terrain of its subject matter. Some readers will invariably find the speculative uncertainties and lists of inconclusive possibilities presented in this collection of essays irritating. But his very style, in and of itself, is surely an intellectually honest, appropriate and playful response to the myriad interconnected complexities of screen-based culture. Like a preview channel, Conomos skips between worlds, continents, media, quotations, analogies, reflections and histories as if to demonstrate the kind of relationships needed to navigate the spaces in between the narrative and poetic structures of cinema and the speculative open-ended world of remediated moving image formations.

Like its slippery sister formations, video art has until relatively recently asserted little independent essence. It was defined against that which it was other to: cinema, television, photography, painting, etc. By contrast, video art is now so omnipresent that it is easy to forget its decades of relative obscurity. Conomos has long worked to help support the vital yet flimsy bridge between cinema and so-called new media. In Mutant Media, Conomos aims “to delineate critical debates about the convergence taking place between celluloid cinema and new technologies” (p. 196). This he achieves. Moreover, he alludes to a space in which filmmakers and artists might share a consideration of their work in terms of how it operates as a carrier of meaning within lived and bodily experience and a reflexive awareness of the inevitable gap between intention and reception. The epistemology of process that has characterised advanced cultural production for several decades is the movement of thought across mediums. For Conomos, cinema provides one interface. For others, it might be architecture, music or philosophy. Perhaps, once we become critically engaged with any medium, it becomes exponentially easier to transpose that engagement anywhere else. To see the world critically, reflexively, philosophically or poetically, is to see the world anew. There are many interfaces that might enable this transformation. Just as Friedrich Nietzsche once described his lonely philosophical flights, noting that “near and nearest things” now somehow seemed “transformed” (1), art is simply another means with which the mystery in which things can become other things might be contemplated. In a complex and rapidly changing social and cultural landscape, specific knowledge is potentially less transferable to newer or emerging contexts than a critically reflexive level of engagement with culture itself. Not simply looking, but noting from where and how one is looking, is potentially an infinitely transposable skill. In a cultural landscape defined as much by bodily, linguistic, social and digital formations as it is by traditional media, cinema and its remediated screen-based descendent formations have, and will find, new means with which to intervene.

Any attempt to navigate the “in between” spaces of moving image culture confronts formidable challenges. Although somewhat connected under the rubric of critical theory and popular culture, cinema and contemporary art can nonetheless employ quite specialised rhetoric and references. The author must somehow avoid generalisations. The author should also possess a deep understanding of the disparate elements that his or her subject is supposedly “in between”. In this series of idiosyncratic essays, Conomos achieves a remarkable degree of success in meeting these demands. He makes a sustained assault on the prejudices and self-inflicted limitations of existing moving image and new media theory and presents his speculative summaries in a remarkably lucid yet playfully poetic style that is refreshingly free of constipated theoretical jargon. Instead, significant themes consistently duck and weave through an encyclopedic array of quotations, disclaimers and assertions. There are some quibbles. Sometimes the sidetracks, quotations and lists of key figures can distract from the point. Some points are unnecessarily repeated. But, as with any collection of discrete essays from a consistent mind worked together into a single volume, this is probably inevitable. Distractions aside, Mutant Media is an inspiring, open-ended survey of the coalfaces of moving image culture, meticulous yet wandering, readable yet challenging, informative yet partly autobiographical. For a single work at the intersection of cinema, film criticism and theory, video art and new media, it is certainly an impressive template.

Endnotes

Friedrich Nietzsche, “Preface”, Human, All Too Human [1878], trans. Marion Faber with Stephen Lehmann, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1996, p. 8

Dr Sean Lowry is a Sydney-based artist, musician and writer and Lecturer in Creative Arts at the University of Newcastle. His latest video work Lapdancer2: a series of popular songs reinterpreted within the moving image was recently showcased at MOP Projects in Sydney.

Links:
John Conomos: website, email
Read an extract from Mutant Media
Buy the book: Amazon, Artspace

Hymns from the Blazing Chariot trailer

2009-10-05T01:06:00.004+08:00

Hymns from the Blazing Chariot trailer
Directed by Jacen Tan/Hosaywood
Music by Rudra, from Brahmavidya: Transcendental I (2009)
YouTube upload date: 1 October 2009
YouTube URL

On 12 November 2008, Jacen posted this on his website:

Hosaywood will film Singapore metal veterans RUDRA’s new music video, ‘Hymns from the Blazing Chariot’. Founders of ‘Vedic Metal’, Rudra’s unique fusion of Indian traditional music and extreme metal has won them critical acclaim worldwide. The track is taken from their upcoming album, to be released with the video in early 2009.

Well, the new Rudra album came out already. So now they say "late 2009." I hope this means quality control.

Jacen Tan's an interesting case. From no-budget DIY cult internet hit (Tak Giu, 2004) to this--what seems to be an Asian take on 300. Very curious how this will turn out. And he better not mess up with Rudra, one of the best metal bands around.

Links:
Rudra: website, Myspace, YouTube channel, Facebook
Jacen Tan/Hosaywood: website, YouTube channel, Facebook
Jacen Tan's short films online:

Kwa Giu (Watch Football) - 2007-09 (release delayed)
Zo Hee (Make Movie) - 2007
Zo Gang (Go Work) - 2006
Zo Peng (Go Army) - 2005
Tak Giu (Kick Ball) - 2004

lihat nada

2009-10-03T05:10:00.006+08:00

rough cut 2- lihat nada (2007)
directed by James Teh
produced by Siti Kamaluddin for Origin Artistic Brunei
cast: Juliana Indera, Nadzri Harif, Zul F, Jeffri Ibrahim, Wasli Ahmad, Fairuz Zabady, James Dean Vielma, Hjh Maisalamah Mohd, Hatta, B.Boy

Links:
James Teh: website, YouTube
Filming "lihat nada" at the Origin Artistic Brunei blog
Origin Artistic Brunei's related video activities in the news: here and here

ChitraKarKhana: Khirkeeyaan

2009-09-30T02:01:00.001+08:00

Featured above is Khirkeeyaan: Episode01: streets (YouTube URL)

Khirkeeyaan (khirkee-window / yaan-vehicle)

KhirkeeYaan is an exploration of an open-circuit tv system as a local area network communication, micro-media generation and feedback device.

It employed security apparatus,otherwise used for surveillance and 'secret' use. Television sets and cheap surveillance equipment, coupled with an RF modulator, mics, audio mixer and metres of coax cable were laid out to form collaborative conversation systems for the 'use' of the community-at-large. TV's and electricity, consent and participation were sourced on-site(s) often drawing from a multitude of sources.

Four sets of cameras,TVs and mics were planted within a 200 metre radius of each other. The cameras sat on top of the TVs and the audio-video from the four views were connected to a quad processor and audio mixer. This quadrant comprising of sound and image from all four locations was fed back to the TVs, allowing the subject/viewer/performer/audience to interact with others in the frame. Video became the ‘site’ for these interactions and conversations.

ChitraKarKhana’s prior media projects have employed cheap and accessible DIY video and editing software, hardware and skills to produce on-site 'televised' media. This project pushes that envelope of site,community media and technology further. Importantly,here the 'filmmaking' is automatic, made possible through eye-level communication, real-time feedback and the absense of cameraman and editor. The technology is even cheaper; no computers and DV technology, but commercially applied CCTV and CATV equipmnet.

The 'televisation' produced conversations, performance, and rapidly-evolving subjectivities, all happening in 'local' time. The 7 episodes were generated through 7 sets of installations in different neighbourhoods in and around Khirkee Extension, New Delhi over 3 weeks, during Shaina Anand's associate residency at Khoj studios, April, 2006.

KhirkeeYaan Episodes in OGG (right click to download):

Streets
Home
One Lane
Factories
Doctors Advice
Village Women
Lane Again

Links:
evilareve's YouTube channel
ChitraKarKhana main site
KhirkeeYaan site

(All info above from KhirkeeYaan)

Baul Without Boundaries

2009-09-28T04:20:00.011+08:00

What kind of video geek doesn't like online film festivals? Those with bad internet connection that's who!

Oh well. Free wifi is free wifi. So it took a while to get me my Indian music fix from this video featured in Culture Unplugged:

View this movie at cultureunplugged.com

Baul Without Boundaries : Director: Sutapa Deb | Genre: Documentary | Produced In: 2009

Synopsis: Baul is one of the few widely known and appreciated types of folk music in Bengal. Baul is not only a kind of music, it is basically a Bengali religious sect. The members of the sect are themselves called Bauls, and the songs they sing are named for them, Baul-gAn (Baul songs). The filmmaker travels to various parts of Bengal searching if the golden days of Baul singers are over.

Links:

Original URL

Filmmaker-journalist Sutapa Deb's Wikipedia page

Dictionary of War: Piracy

2009-09-28T02:47:00.003+08:00

Tilman Baumgärtel on Piracy, from the 2008 Taipei Biennial edition of the Dictionary of War:

Tilman Baumgärtel
Taipei, October 25th 2008, 11:00 - 11:30
Watch Video - Download Torrent

This paper looks at the phenomenon of media piracy on the internet and in real space. As I live in the Philippines, I will focus on the piracy here, but my remarks will not be limited to the local situation. I will look at the phenomenon of piracy as such and try and outline some observations about how piracy works. First of all, I will look at piracy as a means of distributing films, and - drawing on interviews with some traders of pirated media material - on how the piracy market functions in the Philippines. I will also discuss the effect that the access to quality films has on the local film culture and media literacy in general and on the teaching of film in particular. Then I will discuss the unprecedented rise of media piracy in the last couple of years as one of the most prominent issues of the "digital millennium". The "Pirates of the New World Image Order" (Patricia R. Zimmermann) are not only piggy-backing on the new globalized economy that has arisen due to the world-wide deregulation and liberalization of markets in the 1980s and 1990s. They are also profiteers of a number of technological developments in the computer sciences such as the international expansion of the Internet, which has challenged traditional notions of copy right and intellectual property on a very fundamental level.

Related links:
Original URL
Tilman Baumgärtel's homepage and Southeast Asian cinema blog

Karacoma: I.K.T.S

2009-09-26T00:07:00.007+08:00

I.K.T.S by Karacoma
2nd Camera-Operator by Shopian Said
Assistant Director by Saiful Lizam
Lyrics by Sam Siren
Music by Sam/Mawie/Adi/Jaz
Recording Engineer by Mawie
Mixed by Simon Efemey at Chapel Studio, Lincolnshire
Mixing Engineer by Marcel Legane
everything else by Adam Groves of Visual Dimensions

the mervert: BUZZ!
Oi! So have you seen the Karacoma video by that Adam Groves dude?
http://www.adam-groves.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLemQfLffiE
fara fara wong wong: dork!
yeh. just did.
the mervert: Well? What do you think? Should we put it on the blog?
fara fara wong wong: mwahahahahaha!
go! it's cute... LAH! hihihihihihi!
you say lah in brunei right? or is that just a sing thing?
the mervert: Bitchard.
But don't you think it's a bit rough?
fara fara wong wong: it's cuuuute... brunei video babies making baby steps...
making itti-witti metal videos
and it's METAL damnit >:-)
metal in brunei! so exotic!
so cuuuute...
oh! and i just saw that playlist aljazeera episode on metal in the middle east (aka west asia!)
the mervert: Finally! Told you to see it months ago!
fara fara wong wong: "why heavy metal? we live in heavy metal." cue bullets and bombs. heh! that's da shit!
the mervert: Told you you'd like it!
Anyway... Actually pleasantly surprised at least some of the "veteran" Brumetal scenesters are still up and about.
And making videos too!
fara fara wong wong: ooooh.
aaaah.
yeh. so fringe.
so this adam dude is a white guy?
the mervert: I'm not sure. I think he's half-half.
He seems prolific. Hoping to talk to him before I fly next month.
fara fara wong wong: checking his blog.
he english write weird like... LAH!
the mervert: Must be local then (?)... Fascinating character. His punk band's not bad too.
fara fara wong wong: don't exoticize him!
the mervert: I'm not! You started with that pun.
So do we put this on the blog?
fara fara wong wong: i said yes already.
you're being stupid mervert.
the mervert: Don't call me "Mervert"!
fara fara wong wong: but you are a mervert!
the mervert: Aiyo!
Heh!
So you think it's up to par?
fara fara wong wong: up to par? weh?
we have standards?!
the mervert: Ermmm...
Got me there.
I told the esteemed Master Ocampo to come up with some smart-ish mission-vision for the blog project. But...
Well...
Guess we're all lazy bastards.
fara fara wong wong: heh! koala boy needs to get laid...LAH!
the mervert: Stop with the LAHs. It's getting old.
fara fara wong wong: lalalalalalalalalah!
anyway, also saw adam's apartment thriller.
it's not too bad for a short.
adam's got a thing for beating up chicks huh?
nasty!
brunei bdsm?!
the mervert: Hah! As opposed to Brunei BSB?! >:-)
fara fara wong wong: and that jasmin chick's quite cute too.
the mervert: Yes, she is. Heard she's an RBA FA.
fara fara wong wong: aha!
see!
see! you are a mervert!
lalalalalalalalalah!
the mervert: Bitch...
You mentioned! I'm just seconding the motion.
fara fara wong wong: hook line and sinker~
foo!
the mervert: :-p
fara fara wong wong: ah. so.
i'm starting to have serious doubts about what yer actually "researching" there
hihihihihihihihi
the mervert: Hey! Don't dis.
This is serious shit I'm doing.
fara fara wong wong: so you say.
hey! i gotta sleep, man.
if you're not gonna put this on the blog then i will!
i'm gonna put in this little chat of ours too.
the mervert: Don't! Not yet!
At least edit it!
fara fara wong wong: too late!
YOU can ALWAYS edit it off afterwards, you know!
the mervert: No. Lazy bitch. Don't do that. That would look so unprofessional...
so...
uh... blog-like.
fara fara wong wong: it IS a blog.

more linkies:
YouTube URL
the Visual Dimensions channel
Karacoma's Myspace
Karacoma's Leading To Rock page with other Brunei rockers!

ANACBANUA trailer

2009-09-23T16:29:00.013+08:00

Based on contemporary anlong, a Pangasinan-language poetic form, ANACBANUA (The Child of the Sun) is the first digital feature film in the Pangasinan language.

This film will have its Philippine premiere during the 11th Cinemanila International Film Festival at Taguig City beginning from the second week of October 2009.

Filmmaker Christopher Gozum, a Pangasinan native hailing from Bayambang, finished part of postproduction work for this film in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he works as a videographer. Gozum's last work, "Surreal Random MMS Texts for a Mother, a Sister, and a Wife who longs for You: Landscape with Figures" (2008), filmed almost entirely with a Nokia cellular phone, was produced during his first year abroad as a Philippine migrant worker in Riyadh. This too displayed Gozum's poetic penchant, basing the narrative on Carlos Bulosan's “Landscape with Figures,” one of the poems from Letter from America (1942), which detailed Bulosan's own biographical situation as a migrant Filipino in America.

The embedded video of the ANACBANUA trailer below may take a while to load. You can go straight to the original ExposureRoom link to see the film in lower resolutions for lower bandwidths, or download, embed, and link the film trailer to your own website.

View on ExposureRoom

Trailer

Duration: 00:04:23

Definition: SD

Dimensions: 768 x 576

Size: 305.59MB

File Type:.flv

Download link: ExposureRoom

Related links:

Chris Gozum's independent film outfit, Sine Caboloan
Chris Gozum interview with Erwin S. Hernandez posted at http://theotherdissent.blogspot.com/
Read Carlos Bulosan's "Landscape with Figures" and a short essay on the author by Susan Evangelista, "Carlos Bulosan, the Postcolonial Poet"

Yasmin Ahmad’s Films: facts about Amir Muhammad’s new book

2009-09-22T19:49:00.001+08:00

From the KLue blog:

Yasmin Ahmad’s Films: facts about Amir Muhammad’s new book

Friday, 18/09/09 - 17:18PM Filed in Blog by zedeck

The world of Malaysian moving pictures, aside from its recent triumphs, have also been afflicted by a singular tragedy: the passing of beloved filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad on 26 July.

It seemed as if the entire nation went into mourning. There were heartfelt tributes from fellow filmmakers, the press, members of the public. More unscrupulous bodies, such as Kosmo!and Mangga Online, published exposes of Yasmin's private life - and were roundly (and rightly) criticised for it.

Three months on, we are still mulling over what Yasmin's films mean to us, and what sort of effect her life - and death - has had / will have on Malaysia.

Enter Amir Muhammad's Yasmin Ahmad's Films. When we ask him what, exactly, his new book is about, Amir says: "I want to keep it a secret."

However, he is kind enough to drop a hint: a tribute of Yasmin he wrote for Canadian film magazine Cinema Scope. Go read! The article's postscript reads:

"He decided to write the forthcoming book Yasmin Ahmad's Films (Matahari Books, ISBN 9789834484514) after realizing this article leaves many things unsaid."

So the book is new stuff by you? When was it written?

Yes it's by me, and it's over 60,000 words long!

It was written entirely in the fasting month, in two weeks, from 2 to 15 September. We are now in the proofreading stage. It consists of 8 chapters - and the names of the chapters are written right there, on the doughnut that is on the cover.

Where did the book come from? What prompted you to write it?

[When Yasmin passed away] I was depressed and even angry. But depression and anger alone won't make the type of book that I wanted to write. I was then commissioned by Cinema Scope to write an article about her in August, and after I finished it I felt that I had much, much more to say.

I was prompted to really start the book when I heard about another death, of a Filipino friend of mine named Alexis Tioseco. He was a film critic, only 29, and I think he would have wanted to read it - although it certainly isn't an orthodox book of film criticism.

I didn't sleep at night for two whole weeks and I even fell ill, but I went on with it.

How much is the book going for?

On Amazon.com it's USD20! Local price, we don't know yet. Depends on how many pages, and what type of paper we choose.

My royalties go to the newly established Mercy-Yasmin Ahmad Fund for Children, so I don't want the price to be too low.

When will it launch?

It's already set to launch in Seoul on 19 November. Some nice folks thought it should be launched there, at an international conference on multiculturalism and film - so who am I to refuse? So I said yes, even though the book wasn't even fully written yet. But hey, all writers need deadlines.

Back in Malaysia, I would love to do a series of events based on the book, in colleges and so on. Representatives from Mercy will also be joining in to encourage volunteerism among the yoof.

Our interests are piqued. Once again: Amir Muhammad's Yasmin Ahmad's Films is already available for pre-order on Amazon.com!

Go here for the original link.

Radioactive Sago Project: Alcohol

2009-09-18T22:57:00.009+08:00

What the hell happened to this blog?! I leave you two geeks alone and you turn it into a borefiesta!

You guys relax, have a beer, have some Alcohol:

ALCOHOL

Music by Radioactive Sago Project
Directed by Mark Galvez & Dustin Uy
Produced by Mina Caliguia
An Artfarm Asia Production

This track is from the Eraserheads tribute album UltraElectroMagneticJam (2006).

Links:

Youtube channels of two Artfarmers: emmshin and dcloud (aka Dustin Uy, one of the co-directors of this here vid)

Artfarm Asia (currently inactive)

Radioactive Sago Project: myspace, blog, wiki

Cardboard monuments:

2009-09-18T22:24:00.002+08:00

City, language and 'nation' in contemporary Telugu cinema

S. V. Srinivas

Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, Karnataka, India

Correspondence to S. V. Srinivas (email: svsrinivas99@gmail.com)

KEYWORDS

city • Telugu cinema • language • region • identity • representation

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at how the city of Hyderabad, the capital of the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and production centre of the Telugu film industry, has been represented in recent popular cinema. It outlines the history of a new mode of representing the city in Telugu cinema and argues that its significance lies in the tendency to delocalize the city. Criminalization of the city's older inhabitants, who are marked by either religion (Islam) or their 'non-standard' dialect of Telugu, often accompanies this move. In the process, any claims that they might have on the city are delegitimized. Okkadu, a major commercial hit, restaged the country versus city dichotomy and the antagonisms complicated by cultural and political tensions between the three constituent regions of Andhra Pradesh. This film follows the late 1990s trend in the film industry to recreate entire cityscapes within the studio, ensuring that location shooting in busy city streets and neighbourhoods merely returns us to the grandeur of lavish and 'realistic' studio sets. It reconstructs Hyderabad's most recognizable monument, the 400-year-old Charminar, in addition to its obviously imaginary residential neighbourhood. This paper looks at how and why the city of Hyderabad, especially its older parts, for which Charminar is a metonym, is rendered into a fantasy space in the film.

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The above text is from a special issue on cinematic representations of the tropical urban/city in:

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Volume 29 Issue 1, Pages 87 - 100

Published Online: 13 Mar 2008

Outsider and insider views of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City:

2009-09-18T20:22:00.009+08:00

The Lover/L’Amant, Cyclo/Xích lô, Collective Flat/Chung cu and Bargirls/Gái nhay

Tess Do ¹ and Carrie Tarr ²

¹ School of Languages and Linguistics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia
² School of Performance and Screen Studies, Kingston University, London, UK

Correspondence to Carrie Tarr (email: c.tarr@kingston.ac.uk)

KEYWORDS

Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City • Vietnamese cinema • Đổi mới (Renovation) • cinematic city • globalization • nostalgia

ABSTRACT

This article addresses representations of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City in four films made since Đổi mới, the opening up of Vietnam to western influences, initiated in 1986. The Lover/L’Amant (1992) is a Franco-British heritage film which reconstructs the city from a Eurocentric neocolonial perspective, while Cyclo/Xích lô (1995), a French-funded film made by a France-based Vietnamese filmmaker, is a contemporary poetic thriller which treats the city expressively as the site of present-day corruption and violence. The nostalgia evident in these two ‘outsider’ films is contrasted with the more complex views of the city in two state-funded low-budget ‘insider’ films by local Vietnamese filmmakers, Collective Flat/Chung cu (1999) and Bargirls/Gái nhay (2003); the first, an intellectual fable set in the decade or so following reunification/Independence in 1975 which recalls an attempt at collective living, the second, a hugely popular treatment of contemporary urban realities, both corrupt and progressive. Examining how the mise-en-scène and narratives of the city differ from film to film, the essay takes the representation of the city through changing historical, political, social and economic times, from colonial-orientalist Saigon to corrupt, capitalist Ho Chi Minh City via the slow degeneration of the postwar socialist/collectivist experiment. In so doing, it confirms the importance of the films’ moments and contexts of production in the construction of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City as a cinematic ‘city-text’.

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The above text is from a special issue on cinematic representations of the tropical urban/city in:

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Volume 29 Issue 1, Pages 55 - 67

Published Online: 13 Mar 2008

Mapping spectral tropicality in The Maid and Return to Pontianak

2009-09-18T19:31:00.007+08:00

Sophia Siddique Harvey

Department of Communication and Theatre Arts, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, USA

Correspondence to Sophia Siddique Harvey (email: sophfeline@earthlink.net)

KEYWORDS

spectral tropicality • Singapore • The Maid • Return to Pontianak • horror • folk beliefs • the uncanny

ABSTRACT

Contemporary, postcolonial Singapore has tamed, managed, and essentially disavowed its tropicality, aptly captured symbolically as the 'air-conditioned nation'. This essay traces how two recent Singapore horror films, The Maid (2005) and Return to Pontianak (2001), evoke the 'return of the repressed' as a form of haunting that I call 'spectral tropicality'. The films image and imagine this spectral return through unruly bodies (citizen subjects, female domestic workers, ghosts and vampire-ghosts) and uncanny landscapes (the jungle and city). In particular, the films and this analysis examine two sociocultural spectres lurking beneath Singapore as a tropical urban city-nation: the female domestic worker (The Maid) and ethnoracial folk beliefs (The Maid and Return to Pontianak). The Maid features the Hungry Ghosts Festival in the Chinese religious calendar, ghost marriages and an engagement with yin and yang energies, while Return to Pontianak deals with Malay folk beliefs of semangat ('life force'), and the pontianak, a female vampire-ghost. The Maid attempts to integrate Chinese folk beliefs into contemporary Singapore's cityscape, particularly the architecturally conserved Chinatown shophouses, while Return to Pontianak displaces Malay folk beliefs onto the tropical forest, which is mapped as a threatening other(ed) space and serves as Singapore's tropical doppelganger. Both films suggest that these folk beliefs have an unruly presence within the state's seemingly harmonious and meritocratic ethnoracial ideologies.

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The above text is from a special issue on cinematic representations of the tropical urban/city in:

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Volume 29 Issue 1, Pages 24 - 33

Published Online: 13 Mar 2008

Tropical Hong Kong:

2009-09-18T19:21:00.005+08:00

Narratives of absence and presence in Hollywood and Hong Kong films of the 1950s and 1960s

Wendy Gan

School of English, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR

Correspondence to Wendy Gan (email: wchgan@hkucc.hku.hk)

KEYWORDS

Hong Kong • Southeast Asia • film • regionalization • exoticism • tropical

ABSTRACT

Despite being subtropical, Hong Kong, in both Hollywood and Hong Kong films of the 1950s and 1960s, is often filmically represented as tropical. This subtle climatic elision, I argue, holds a particular political valence that varies according to filmic tradition. In Hollywood narratives, Hong Kong's tropicality is a means to exoticize and, ultimately, marginalize the realities of the local. It is a way to turn Hong Kong's physical presence into an absence. In Hong Kong films in that same cold war environment, the relative blandness of the city is an attempt to realign its film industry with the free nations of Southeast Asia. For Hong Kong films, the strategy of tropicalization was thus a means to turn away from China and redefine Hong Kong as part of a network of capitalist, modern, overseas Chinese cities located in the sunny tropics of Southeast Asia.

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The above text is from a special issue on cinematic representations of the tropical urban/city in:

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Volume 29 Issue 1, Pages 8 - 23

Published Online: 13 Mar 2008

Tropics, city and cinema

2009-09-18T19:20:00.000+08:00

I shall be reposting more abstracts and links to the full texts featured in the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Volume 29 Issue 1 (March 2008). Chua Beng Huat's introductory essay in this issue will explain:

Tropics, city and cinema: Introduction to the special issue on cinematic representation of the tropical urban/city

Chua Beng Huat

Asia Research Institute and Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Correspondence to Chua Beng Huat (email: soccbh@nus.edu.sg)

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The essays in this issue transect three very big and loose concepts – tropics, city and cinema. Each signifies a range of meanings that stretch from very narrow specific definition to having determining effects on the minutiae of everyday life. 'Tropics', especially in its adjectival form, narrowly signifies hot weather. Significantly, at this mundane level 'hot weather' immediately 'determines' life. 'Heat' induces 'stupor', thus incapacity to labour. Little wonder then that Lee Kuan Yew, the statesman who helmed the transformation of Singapore from a declining port city to a complex advanced capitalist economy, singled out air-conditioning as the most important invention of the twentieth century (George, 2000). Without it, Singaporeans would be somnambular zombies for a significant part of every afternoon, the frenzy of activity, including work, would be impossible. As for 'city', the concept has never been a coherent physical unit with clear boundaries, as the 'hinterland' is constantly taking on urban qualities and practices in what is also called the 'urbanization of the rural'. Furthermore, with globalization, the reach of cities extends beyond the nation as they link up with the global city network, at different scales and with varying degrees of success. Finally, 'cinema' is a ubiquitous quotidian entertainment; the often air-conditioned and darkened viewing space and the individualized seating provide privacy in the crowd and combine with the action on the big screen to deliver respite from the stresses of daily urban life. However, in the ways a film frames its reality on screen and structures its narration, cinema is unavoidably a mode of representation of 'reality', from documentary realism to allegory to fantasy, in different temporal registers, from the present to imagined future. As 'a new way of encountering reality and a part of reality thereby perceived for the first time' (Shaviro quoted in Clarke, 1997: 2), the ideological effects of cinema resonate beyond the darkened theatre space to provoke critical reflections on the actually existing environment, a necessary prelude to social and political action.

Interweaving these three concepts – tropics, city and cinema – produces a complex imaginary. For example, the idea of dystopia, which is not encountered in the orderliness – however chaotic in appearance – of urban everyday life, is best projected in futurist terms on the cinema screen; paraphrasing Clarke (1997: 6), the dystopian alter ego of modernity is arguably framed more forcefully in filmic representations of the city than in any other aesthetic form and medium. The complex imaginary defies any attempt to theorize it as a unitary concept. This makes every possible exploration of this imaginary fragmentary, always apprehended from a particular perspective with specific methodological tools. Every essay in this themed issue thus stands as one fragment, whose comparability and connections to each other are to be discovered in the reading of the essays as a 'single' text. That is, instead of conventionally expecting the writer-analyst to cross spatial and cultural boundaries to provide comparative knowledge, comparative knowledge of the cinematic representation of the tropical city is to be derived from the reading, with the authors focusing their analysis on selected films that represent particular cities.

Displacing nature

Among the multiple constellations of meanings that may be derived from the concept of the 'tropics', those connected to 'nature' remain predominant. For example, almost all the essays in an earlier themed issue of this journal on 'Constructing the tropics' (Driver & Yeoh, 2000) focus on 'nature' in the tropics – on colonial imaginations of the tropics as 'lands of great natural abundance, alive with luxuriant vegetation and exotic birds and animals, and blessed with perennially warm climates' (Arnold, 2000: 7), or the flip side, as 'sites of physical risk to the westerner, in the forms of disease, insects, large mammals and vicious tribes' (Naylor, 2000: 50) or, finally, as lands with 'exploitable' natural resources – and including Darwinian naturalist visions (Martins, 2000), climate and masculinity (Duncan, 2000), and a biogeographical construction of the Malay Archipelago (Taylor, 2000).1

Only one essay in 'Constructing the tropics' examines the 'tropical' in urban context; in the ways in which tropical plants (nature) are incorporated into roof gardens and city parks as expressions of what the author calls 'tropical modernism' (Stepan, 2000). Significantly, this incorporation of nature is in effect a displacing of nature from the centre of the imagination of the tropics. And urban planning is one of these procedures of displacement. In urban planning, nature is displaced such that it attains a 'residual' status, inserted after the planners have considered all other functional demands, regardless of the often excessive rhetoric of the need for 'nature' (read: green spaces) in planning discourse. This residual existence is exemplified precisely by 'rooftop' gardens, a 'representation' whose function is to remind us of nature. Other avenues for creating representations of nature through different modes and media of aesthetic practice include cinema, the focus of this themed issue.

Before getting to the concerns of cinema, another effect of displacing the centrality of nature from the tropical imagination needs to be registered. One particular aspect of the colonial European conception of the tropics as its geographical and environmental other (Driver & Yeoh, 2000: 1) is 'a belief in the intrinsic "inferiority" of tropical to European temperate environments' (Arnold, 2000: 7), a presumed inferiority that engendered an ideological assumption of 'the primitivism of the social and cultural systems', the better to facilitate its colonization of the tropics (Duncan, 2000; Naylor, 2000). Displacing nature from the centre of this genealogy of tropical imaginary is thus a necessary step towards what one might say is the 'decolonization' of the tropics in geographical imagination. The tropics must be rid of this western-colonial-centrism and emerge analytically equal to other global regions. The 'city' is an appropriate vehicle to achieve this displacement/decolonization because, as suggested, in the urban/city context, nature is incorporated – substantively and ideationally residual. As an analytic category, 'city in the tropics' is on the same conceptual plain as all cities, unevenness of actual development between cities notwithstanding; the unevenness is to be explained more in terms of history than ideology of 'nature'.

The tropical cinematic city

To bring the city into focus is to foreground the built environment – to take its physicality, including architectural edifices, as the embodiment of accumulated capital (Harvey, 1973: 228) and its infrastructure as facilitator of collective consumption (Castells, 1977: 459–62). A city is never grasped in its entirety, but apprehended in a fragmentary manner through the spaces and places where the daily lives of citizens are enacted and reproduced. In these everyday activities, the abstract unity of the city meets the anthropological reality of the city (de Certeau, 1984: 95). The moments of apprehended fragments are experienced directly, remembered after the fact and/or recorded by different modes and media – memorialized in writing, painting, photography and cinema.

Every 'seeing-perceiving' moment can be likened to a single snapshot; in this sense, a photograph is 'a reproduction of the real' (Heath, 1981: 26). But 'photographic realism' is a thin veil for the work of framing – the construction – of the photographic image itself. Framing is the means through which a photographer, the image-maker, invests the image with meanings, a signifying practice. A given space with its constitutive objects, people and events is rearranged, being either framed in or out, in the 'photographic space'–'geography as given' is transformed into 'geography in photograph', with the 'real' being at risk of being known exclusively through the photograph in an instance of 'imaginative' geography (Schwartz, 1996). The reference to the 'real' is but an alibi for the ideological, the signifying practice. A photograph is therefore always an instance of ideological practice in the precise sense given by Marx, the 'naturalization of the historical' (Barthes, 1972: 109–59).

A movie is a series of photographs moving at 24 frames per second. The constant and sudden, often disjunctive changes are given coherence by a narrative which specifies the sequential placement of the framed images, keeping the images moving in a direction from a beginning to an end (Heath, 1981: 12–13). The aggregated effect of the 'recontextualization of spaces and places within filmic narration' (Natter, 1994: 204) transforms a given city into a 'cinematic city' which re-presents the 'city' in and through a montage of fragmentary images.2 A cinematic city is an instance of what Aiken and Zonn (1994: 20) refer to as 'geography of the mind'–'an ideologically charged cultural creation whereby meanings of place and society are made, legitimized, contested and obscured' (Hopkins, 1994: 47).

Cities are a ubiquitous backdrop for cinemas. Yet, or perhaps precisely because of this ubiquity, David Clarke (1997: 1) writes in the opening of his editorial introduction to the book The Cinematic City: 'So central is the city to film that, paradoxically, the widespread implicit acceptance of its importance has mitigated against an explicit consideration of its actual significance'. In the emerging scholarship in 'Asian' film studies, cities in which films are set are often analytically eclipsed by the ideological preoccupation with the 'nation/national'. For example, studies of mainland Chinese films, which arrived at the global screen with the now famous 'Fifth Generation' directors, including the high stylist Zhang Yimou, generally focus on how the 'nation/national' is ideologically represented (Lu, 1997) through the perennial theme of the authoritarianism (traditional-familial or contemporary-communist) intrinsic to Chinese patriarchal culture (Chen, 2000: 200). This 'national' interest extends to analysis of Hong Kong cinema, threaded through as it is with concerns of 'Chinese' identity and national politics (Zhang, 2004; Berry & Farquhar, 2006).

By focusing on the city, the essays in this themed issue emphasize the modernity of countries and people in the tropics in the age of global capitalism. Together, they reveal the types and levels of ideological work films can do in the context of their production, circulation and consumption in different historical contexts, particularly the present. All the essays show that the inscription of particular ideological interest at the point of production determines to a very significant extent the way the referenced city is transformed into the cinematic city. The cinematic city is ideologically inscribed in a particular manner to partake in the symbolic politics, and often 'realpolitik', that are germane to its local, national and transnational audiences. As the medium through which the 'city' is communicated and disseminated, the cinematic city mediates not only how the city is known, but also how politics is imagined and political problems can be 'resolved'. The multiple levels of meanings that a cinematic city can evoke for different audiences defy any suggestion of a singular focus or reading of any particular film.

The essays

This themed issue is motivated by the desire to displace a temperate-centric, colonial-interested discourse of the 'tropics/tropical', in which a concept of nature is central, so as to free the tropics/tropical, particularly tropical Asia in this instance, from western-centric discourse as an act of decolonization of the mind. In examining the representation of the urban/city in cinema, the essays focus on the way 'tropicality' is ideologically thematized, or is not. Where it is thematized, analysis discloses the intentionality behind the way 'nature' is constructed/represented for a particular ideological purpose. 'Nature' loses its givenness. Where nature is not given any particular attention by the filmmakers, the salience of 'tropicality' is minimal. In such instances, diegetic attention shifts to contemporary urban lives, opening up and bringing to the fore the multiple ways in which life in tropical Asia may be represented beyond the limited and restricting imaginary dominated by 'nature'. As in all instances, representation of the city in each frame and in an entire film narrative, in documentary mode or in fiction, is never innocent. Analysis of the cinematic city discloses the filmmaker's ideological interests that have been inscribed in the diegetic spaces and narratives which intervene in the perception, knowledge and subsequent action of its audience/citizens.

One mode of western imagination of the 'tropics' is as a place of 'romance', never without blue sky, light clouds and gentle breeze that sways the trees. It is therefore a place for 'escape' from life in the West, be it from the drudgery of the mundane or from a past that demands forgetting. This romantic tropics, Wendy Gan (2008) demonstrates, can be found in 1950s Hollywood representations of Hong Kong as a metonymic for the 'exotic orient'. This intentionally mistaken construction is in sharp contrast to Hong Kong's real climate of seasonal typhoons that wreak havoc with the life of the city annually. Perhaps surprisingly, similar romantic representations of the tropical are found in Hong Kong cinema of the same period. However, here the representation was commercially determined, as the overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia then constituted (and continue to be) a very substantial portion of the transnational audience of Hong Kong cinema; indeed, much of the funding for the Hong Kong film studios was generated from Southeast Asia, in particular Singapore (Wong, 2006). In contrast to 'romance', in Return to Pontianak, lush tropical vegetation is evoked by the film's Singaporean director as an irrepressible margin that haunts contemporary Singapore (Siddique Harvey, 2008), which in the process of urbanizing its population and modernizing its economy has tried to suppress its hot and humid tropicality through modern air-conditioning.

Untamed nature is not the only margin of modern Singapore. Marginalization is a social phenomenon inscribed on the underprivileged inhabitants of the city. Such marginalized inhabitants, including low end migrant workers such as domestic maids from developing Asia, are 'seen but not noticed' by those more successful and respectable. Theirs is a spectral existence in urban Singapore. Although essential to the Singapore economy, their spectral presence renders them socially dispensable, readily replaceable by yet another spectral body. This social dispensability is brought to its ultimate expression in The Maid, in which a Singaporean huaren couple plan the ritual murder of their new Filipina maid, to transform and transport her as a ghost-bride for their mentally handicapped dead son during the annual Hungry Ghosts Festival.3 The social dispensability is emphasized by the fact that the couple have already committed an undiscovered murder of another Filipina maid earlier in the diegetic narrative.

Sophie Siddique Harvey's analysis of the spectral urban provides a conceptual transition in this themed issue. The remaining four essays are set in various cities in the 'tropical' zone. As the characteristics of the natural environment are not featured as themes in any of these films, 'tropical' is only denotative of the geographical location of the cities. The films focus on the unfolding social and political lives enacted within the city as a given setting. Continuing the marginalization theme, the marginalization of individuals and groups is often made highly visible through spatial differentiation. Parts of the city come to be known to all as 'enclaves', such as ethnic enclaves and enclaves of disrepute, where multiple social deviances are concentrated with agglomerative negative imaginaries and effects. Such marginal spaces, however, are resources for filmmakers to project counter-representations and critiques of the mainstream imaginary of the city. Independent filmmakers of Malaysia, Khoo Gaik Cheng (2008) demonstrates, have used marginalized places and spaces in the capital city, Kuala Lumpur, for just such critique, disrupting official and mainstream triumphal narratives of economic development and progress of the Malaysian nation.

The essays of Tess Do and Carrie Tarr (2008) and Ashley Carruthers (2008) both analyze cinematic and music video representations of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. The turbulent history of this Vietnamese city is marked by its very name change: from being Saigon of the colonial era to being named after the 'father of the nation' of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam brings in train the history of the revolutionary wars, first against the colonial French and then the protracted civil war between the communist north and the US-supported south. Little wonder that films set in this city would have history and politics as their main themes and focus. Do and Tarr nicely select for analysis a set of four films that together trace the political and social transition and transformation of colonial Saigon to 'socialist' Ho Chi Minh City, with its incipient, if not fully fledged capitalism. Carruthers' essay analyses how Vietnamese musicals and music videos produced outside Vietnam by post-civil war Vietnamese diasporic enterprises are received/consumed by a diasporic Vietnamese audience in Australia. In a community where biographies of exile are synchronous with the history of the triumph of the 'evil' communist regime in the 'homeland', a very complex set of sentiments are deployed to frame the demands for and reception of how the 'homeland', including Ho Chi Minh City is to be represented.

The final essay takes the politics of cinema beyond the representational into the realm of actual politics of the nation and its constitutive regions. Although India is known to the world of films through Hindi movies from Bombay, the Indian film industry is made up of regional cinemas, including Telegu films, a major constituent of south Indian cinema. S.V. Srinivas (2008) shows that the history of the Telegu film industry is inextricably tied to shifts in the regional political history of southern India; thus the production centre for Telegu films was shifted from Madras (now Chennai), the capital of Tamil Nadu State, to Hyderabad, the capital city of the state of Andhra Pradesh, formed in 1956. The formation of the new state also resulted in a bisection of the city into new and old, a division frequently represented in Telegu films with the old city as 'the site of criminal activity and backwardness' (Srinivas, 2008: 92). However, as Srinivas demonstrates, the politics of the new state is by no means settled and divisions continue to multiply, divisions that constitute both source and representation in different genres of contemporary Telegu cinema, with occasional inversions of the old city as a fantasy utopian space.

Conclusion

Since the 1990s, an emergent academic Asian film studies has focused attention predominantly on Chinese films from the People's Republic of China, the Hong Kong SAR and Taiwan, and Korean films. The relative insignificance of regional South Asian cinema is due to the absence of international audiences, while that of Southeast Asian cinemas is partly a consequence of the small number of productions annually from the respective film industries. The tropical location of the cities in which these films are produced, set and cinematically represented allows them to be discursively organized under the trope of 'tropical urban', which does not imply any substantive comparability, let alone similarities, between the cities in question. What the essays in this issue analyze are the modes of cinematic representation of cities in the tropical belt, of 'cinematic cities'. Such representations may be read as ideological contestations and resolutions of issues – spatial, political and cultural – that are germane to the local political and cultural context, from city to region to nation. In the essays, we see different sets of representations being deployed as means of mediating the audience's knowledge, reflections and concerns with the cities in question and/or in which they reside. In projecting imaginaries of the city that are different from conventional mainstream representations, such ideological representations and mediations contain the potential for reimagining and reconfiguration of the urban/city in question.

Endnotes

1 For a comprehensive study of colonial understanding of nature in Southeast Asia, see Savage (1984).

2 Hopkins (1994: 50) puts this point in general terms: 'The cinematic place is not, therefore, limited to the world represented on the screen (a geography in film), but the meanings constructed through the experience of film (a geography of film)'.

3 The term huaren is used in Singapore to refer to Chinese ethnicity to avoid confusion with 'Chinese' as national identity, which refers strictly to citizens of the People's Republic of China. I adopt this Singaporean term denotatively here, that is, without any connotation of presumed cultural identity of specific Chineseness.

To see more of the above text, and many more like it, go here and here:

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Urban geography as pretext:

2009-09-18T19:00:00.001+08:00

Sociocultural landscapes of Kuala Lumpur in independent Malaysian films

Khoo Gaik Cheng

School of Humanities, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Correspondence to Khoo Gaik Cheng (email: gaikcheng.khoo@anu.edu.au)

KEYWORDS

independent/indie filmmaking • cosmopolitanism • The Big Durian • Bukak Api • 18? • Malaysia

ABSTRACT

Current independent filmmaking in Malaysia has the potential to be an alternative and viable space for creative and political expression, relative to mainstream national cinema (Malay cinema) and to the state. I focus on alternative imagery and sociocultural mappings of Kuala Lumpur in three 'indie' films. All three films contain documentary elements capturing social geographies of the city not represented in mainstream Malay cinema, or even if represented not subjected to a critical gaze by the filmmaker. The Big Durian centres on the perspectives of the city's urban middle class of all ethnicities; Bukak Api portrays the daily struggles of Malay transsexual sex workers in Chow Kit, a predominantly working-class Chinese neighbourhood and red light district; and 18? highlights the opinions of the nongovernmental organization community, bohemians, artists, anarchists and media activists mostly in the cosmopolitan suburb of Bangsar. These representations of the Malaysian urban landscape are pretexts for and politicize the national landscape through a discussion of ethnicity and race politics, sexuality, and the lack of space for freedom of creative expression and critical thinking.

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(Perhaps this text will serve as substantial after-reading upon viewing the 15Malaysia videos.)
The above text is a selection from a special issue on cinematic representations of the tropical urban/city in:

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography

Volume 29 Issue 1, Pages 34 - 54

Published Online: 13 Mar 2008

Moris Rasik (parts 1 & 2)

2009-09-17T23:51:00.008+08:00

Part 1

Part 2

video description:
Produced and distributed by Pusat KOMAS (Malaysia)
Directed by Haanim Bamadhaj
Contact: write the producer
Produced:
Part 1: 2009/04/15
Part 2: 2009/09/03
Duration:
Part 1: 9 minutes
Part 2: 7 minutes 23 seconds

A documentary of a micro-credit program in the war-torn Southeast Asian country of East Timor.

East Timor suffered a violent occupation by Indonesia for 24 years. East Timorese voted for independence in 1999 in a referendum supervised by The UN. UN peace keepers took two weeks to arrive in East Timor after the referendum during which the Indonesian military and Timorese militia systematically destroyed the already under the developed country. Moris rasik is one of several Micro-Credit Programs set up to help this economic devastation.

Part 1: Download Hi-Res / Screening Version (156.2 MB)
Part 2: Download Hi-Res / Screening Version (121.9 MB)

All info from EngageMedia. The original URLs:
Part 1 + Part 2

Cinemascope #40: Amir Muhammad on Yasmin Ahmad

2009-09-17T23:20:00.002+08:00

From the latest issue of Cinemascope:

Deaths of Cinema | The Sweet and the Bitter: Yasmin Ahmad

By Amir Muhammad

The Malays have this bad habit of noticing, in retrospect, atypical behaviour on the part of people who had recently died unexpectedly. These forms of conduct are called buang tebiat, which literally means “throw behaviour.” I say it’s a bad habit because our religious leaders say it’s more in line with superstition than Islam. But still we do it.

And so it was that when Yasmin Ahmad left us so suddenly, we were left looking for clues that she had unknowingly left behind. A newspaper pointed out that she had mysteriously mentioned to her husband that she “probably wouldn’t be able to celebrate Dad’s birthday with him next year.” In the films, too, there could be signs: Why was her final feature Talentime (2009), which had been glibly called “the Malaysian High School Musical” by the media before release, so preoccupied with death, to the extent that its closing shot is of lights in a school hall being shut off?

But even these were feeble attempts at imposing meaning (of the “It was as if she knew” kind). It’s safe to say that her passing was a huge shock. I know that’s a clichéd way of putting it, but she would not have been afraid of an honest cliché. She was the same age as Michael Jackson, who’d gone just a few weeks earlier (an occasion she’d marked on her wildly popular English-language blog: yasminthefilmmaker.blogspot.com), the crucial distinction being that there was so much more she seemed on the verge of doing.

After more than a decade of commercials, Yasmin started making narrative films at the relatively late age of 45. This meant two things: She had amassed enough of a standing through her award-winning commercials to get full creative control; and her films, though born out of an adult worldview, still had the startling vitality of practically a new career.

How could someone with so much life not only in her but ahead of her be snuffed out so soon? Being the religious person that she was—hers were the only film sets I visited where work stopped daily for each of the five prayer times—she would say that Allah knows best.

She made six feature-length films at a prolific rate. The first four, from the made-for-TV Rabun (2003) to Mukhsin (2006) by way of Sepet (2004) and Gubra (2006), all featured the autobiographical Orked as the protagonist. Her last two features, Muallaf (2008) and Talentime, broke away from Orked’s life story but still featured many of the same cast and even the same locations.

She was in the midst of planning two further features whose financing seemed to be secure: a Japanese co-production called Wasurenagusa (Forget-Me-Not) and a Singaporean film with the working title (at least I hope it was just a working title) of Go Thaddeus! The first would have been a fictional drama about a partly Japanese woman (played by her regular actress Sharifah Amani) while the second would have been a biopic of a Singaporean athlete who died very young. (Another case of buang tebiat, perhaps).

Those films, whose fates are now uncertain, would have been interesting because of the different countries involved. Although she had one bona-fide hit (Mukhsin), the others all had devoted followings, as you can see from the hundreds of comments after each of the posts on her still-extant blog. The site, by the way, is an excellent introduction to her voice: cultured and urbane, but also “sentimental and annoying” (in her words), the site of a few spats and small crusades, too. (You can’t leave comments anymore: she had Enabled Moderation after receiving a slew of personal insults disguised as curiosity about her past. But her Facebook page, where she had the maximum amount of allowed friends, has become an oddly cathartic memorial site.)
The sentimentality of her fable-like TV commercials in particular drew a huge following in a country where only 5% of the population even goes to the cinema. They were anticipated during all of our many festive occasions; Malaysia has more public holidays than almost any other place.

Oh, there were people who hated her guts! The basis of this is erotic. Malaysia is a peaceful country in which ethnic tension nonetheless ebbs and flows, exacerbated by the government’s discriminatory policies in favour of the majority ethnic Malays. (Malay is an ethnicity that describes many people in neighbouring countries, too; it does not mean Malaysian citizen. We always have a laugh when a foreign festival catalogue, for example, calls Ho Yuhang a “Malay filmmaker.”)

Yasmin eroticized this by frequently foregrounding interracial romance or attraction. (This describes four out of her six features, and several of her most popular commercials, all of which have been duly Youtubed, which she would have approved of: “Piracy,” she once told me, “is stealing from greedy people.”) She claimed with faux-naïveté to be guided purely by sentiment, but these taboo-busters shocked the prudes. She didn’t back down, and would gladly trumpet the international achievements of her films and commercials (which she continued to make), which of course annoyed some people even more. The death of Yasmin means that there is one less person to laugh at the bigots.

It wasn’t all about interracial love; that would have made her very monotonous. There’s a real sense of family in her films, not just because of the domestic unit that is always foregrounded, but because there is a humane yet raucous inclusivity in her stories, which become miniatures of how Malaysian society can function if we’d just let go of a few hang-ups. Some films I liked more than others. There are things in them that are clumsy, didactic, more akin to PSAs. But they were all unquestionably a part of a thought-out vision that has meant a lot in a country that is still afraid of telling its own stories with candour.

Yasmin’s final film is called Chocolate, is about three minutes long, and was released posthumously as part of an online series called 15Malaysia. (You can view it at www.15malaysia.com.) It’s a parable about the increasing distrust between our two main ethnic groups. A teenage boy is nagged by his offscreen mother. It’s a tight shot of his pretty face. They are ethnically Chinese, and she’s telling him there are no opportunities for him here. We hear another offscreen voice belonging to a young Malay girl, asking if anyone’s around. It turns out he’s at his family-owned grocery store; business must be slow for the counter to be unmanned. The boy goes out, still shirtless, to see her and is struck by her prettiness, which isn’t concealed by her all-white Muslim headgear (the tudung). She asks for batteries and he, like Freud would have approved, shoves a baby bottle at her instead.

She also wants a small bar of chocolate but is a few cents short. The mood until now is almost flirty. But then his mother barks again, demanding to know why he’s talking so much to “that Malay girl.” His tone changes; he snaps to the girl that if she can’t pay for the chocolate, she should just do without it. She leaves, dismayed more by his brusqueness than by his refusal to bend the rules. He seems conflicted about something, then leaves the chocolate and the money she’d given on the counter before he goes offscreen.

There’s a mine of subtextual allusions. There’s the identification of the Chinese with commerce, of the Malays as needing assistance. But this is complicated further: the business isn’t exactly a big one, and she just happens to be carrying not enough change. (In fact, her accent seems posher than his.) The actor is Kahoe Hon, who had played a guy with a grudge against a bright Malay classmate in Talentime. And the actress is Sharifah Amani, whose last scene in Muallaf shows her, for the first time, in a tudung. It seems like they are continuing or at least echoing those earlier roles.

He is drawn to her (does she represent the country?), but at the same time held back by his mother’s worldview. “They fuck you up, your mom and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.”

And what of the chocolate itself? We tend to like it sweet (here in the Orient!) but there’s also the imported bitter type. One of my favourite Yasmin scenes is where Orked’s maid in Mukhsin explains how she makes her style of ice cream. You’ve got to mix in the bitter so you can appreciate the sweet. So it’s oddly apposite that this is what Yasmin has finally, quite literally, put on the table for us.

______________
Amir Muhammad is a Malaysian writer, publisher, and filmmaker. He decided to write the forthcoming book Yasmin Ahmad’s Films (Matahari Books, ISBN 9789834484514) after realizing this article leaves many things unsaid.

Original URL: http://cinema-scope.com/wordpress/?page_id=1008

Martyn See's Top 100 Political Videos

2009-09-16T15:36:00.002+08:00

As of 11 September 2009, the ban on Martyn See's controversial Singapore Rebel has been lifted. This comes four years after the original ban. In an announcement on their website, the Media Development Authority (MDA) deems the documentary no longer in violation of the revised Films Act. (Read more about it here, here and here.)

That's one down. But there's still a lot of Singaporean videos skirting the shadows of censorship. What videos, you ask? What better guy to asses that than someone who survived 16 months of police investigation and three interrogation sessions. So, from Martyn's blog, here's a list of

“We are formed by our own cultural stereotypes which causes us to miss the changes.” - Tian Chua on 15Malaysia

2009-09-16T14:25:00.006+08:00

From The Malaysian Insider:

Time for change, say Malaysian film-makers

Film-maker Benji Lim directed Khairy Jamaluddin in the hilarious and thought-provoking 'Meter'. - Picture by Choo Choy May

By Shazwan Mustafa Kamal

KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 16 — For the past month, Malaysians have been entertained (or not) by the works of 15 film-makers who participated in the 15Malaysia short film project. These films have been downloaded, emailed and just about made it to the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands of Malaysians.

Last night, the 15Malaysia project ended on a pensive yet hopeful note here at the Kuala Lumpur and Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall, just hours before the nation celebrated its 46th Malaysia Day.

The highly-anticipated final short film of the project — “Rojak” by the Suleiman brothers — made its nationwide debut to an enthusiastic audience. “Rojak” is a film which talks about how everything in Malaysia is mixed, from its language, culture as well as our daily interactions with one another.

The audience watching some of the films in the 15Malaysia project last night. - Picture by Choo Choy May

“I’m really happy to see that many of the people who attended tonight’s screening are not the usual ‘artsy’ crowd. It’s good to see more older people here tonight,” quipped Jordan Suleiman, one of the directors for “Rojak”.

The 15 films touched and addressed issues that remain pertinent and essential to Malaysian life, some quirky and amusing like “Halal” by Liew Seng Tat which takes the act of slaughtering a chicken according to Muslim practices to a whole new level.

When asked why they decided to direct these short films, many of them said that it was the fear of the future of Malaysia, and where it was heading that prompted them to make these films.

“It is the fear in my heart as a Malaysian, it is the fear of losing freedom of expression added with the fear of being controlled by the government that made me do this film,” explained Tan Chui Mui who directed “One Future” which starred Opposition MP Tian Chua.

“One Future” is a surreally futuristic film which depicts Malaysia as a progressive nation, with much economic and technological process, and every need of the people “taken care of” by the government.

Opposition MP Tian Chua taking a picture of film-maker Tan Chui Mui who directed him in her surrealistic film 'One Future'. - Picture by Choo Choy May

The catch is that the right to speak has been denied, and people just follow orders and procedures, adding a very Orwellian outlook into the possible interpretations of the film.

Many of the directors said the 15Malaysia project was not just about making films that are entertaining and in essence “Malaysian”, but also films which highlight the many issues Malaysians deal with almost every day.

Benji Lim who directed “Meter” which featured Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin felt that Malaysians were not doing enough to steer the nation back to its proper course. The movie, which ends with a shot of a key chain ‘keris’ is personal to Benji as he recalls reading about now-Home Minister Datuk Seri Hishamuddin Hussein’s infamous keris waving incident a few years back and being saddened by the blatant racism propagated by that action.

“At the end of the day, we accept that the keris is just a symbol. But let it continue to remain a harmless symbol. That is why I chose to de-sensitise the keris issue in my film,” said Benji.

Perhaps the most poignant quote of the night came from Tian Chua, who summarised the essence and spirit of 15Malaysia: “We are formed by our own cultural stereotypes which causes us to miss the changes.”

15Malaysia was spearheaded by renowned Malaysian singer-songwriter-producer Pete Teo and it was aimed at dealing with Malaysian issues, both the good and the bad. Fifteen films were released online for free on a weekly basis starting from Aug 17 to right up to today, Sept 16.

The project was a collaboration with Packet One (P1) Networks, a wireless broadband company, the sponsor of the entire project.

The films may be viewed or downloaded at www.15Malaysia.com.

15Malaysia (15 of 15): Rojak!

2009-09-16T00:42:00.007+08:00

"Rojak!"
Director: Suleiman Brothers (Jordan & Mussadique Suleiman)

Official release date: 16 September 2009 (Youtube upload: 2009-09-12)
15Malaysia page // Youtube URL

Principal Cast: Joseph Anthony // Supporting Cast: Mussadique Suleiman, Jordan Suleiman, Yasmin Suleiman, Rosli Mahmood, Ashrel, Leena Shah, Afiq Shahrim, Andy Saiden, Gopi, Khairil M. Bahar, CIPLAK, Edna Tan, Arul Rahim, Dawn Cheong, Jay Delancy, Akin, Zaim Zulkarnain, Johan Garcia, Raisa Fatima, Louis Dorall, Pugly // Executive Producer: Packet One Networks // Producer: Pete Teo // DOP: Mussadique Suleiman // Art Director: Bulma // Music: Ryo Leang // Post Video: Studio Voxel // Post Audio: Yusof Han, Factory Music, The Ark Studios // Translation: Copyleft Studio

A Rojak seller’s take on Malaysia’s multi-faceted social political tapestry. Made entirely with CGI special effects. Visually stunning.
Animasi CGI pendek yang mengisahkan seorang penjual rojak yang terlibat dalam rantaian bermacam-macam gejala sosio-politik Malaysia.

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Read about Suleiman Brothers (Jordan & Mussadique Suleiman)
Watch The Making of Healthy Paranoia here or here
Main site: 15Malaysia
Producer Pete Teo's main Youtube Channel: RedBagMusic

(Info from 15Malaysia and Wikipedia Malaysia)

15Malaysia (14 of 15): Lollipop

2009-09-15T01:58:00.007+08:00

"Lollipop"
Director: Nam Ron

Official release date: 15 September 2009 (Youtube upload: 2009-08-27)
15Malaysia page // Youtube URL

Principal Cast: Bront Palare // Supporting Cast: Adik Syahidayati Asyiqeen, Adik Izuan, Hariry Abdul Jalil // Executive Producer: Packet One Networks // Producer: Pete Teo // DOP: Pali Yasir // Art Director: Mazalan Zulkifli // Editor: Akash Deep Singh, Abd Samad Hassan // Sound: Ahmad Tajuddin // Post Video: Tiger Tiger // Post Audio: The Ark Studios // Wardrobe: Bahri Umararif // Translation: Copyleft Studio

A haunting portrayal of a pedophile preparing to hunt, interspersed with metaphors on the state of Malaysian politics.
Kisah seorang pedofilia yang sedang bersiapkan diri untuk memulakan ‘pemburuannya’, bertaburan dengan perumpamaan dan cerpisan penggambaran senario politik Malaysia pada masa kini.

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Read about Nam Ron
Watch The Making of Healthy Paranoia here or here
Main site: 15Malaysia
Producer Pete Teo's main Youtube Channel: RedBagMusic

(Info from 15Malaysia and Wikipedia Malaysia)

15Malaysia (13 of 15): Healthy Paranoia

2009-09-10T18:36:00.039+08:00

"Healthy Paranoia"
Director: Khairil Bahar

Official release date: 14 September 2009 (Youtube upload: 2009-08-14)
15Malaysia page // Youtube URL

Principal Cast: Baki Zainal, Dato’ Sri Liow Tiong Lai // Supporting Cast: Nick Dorian // Executive Producer: Packet One Networks // Producer: Pete Teo // DOP + Editor: Khairil M. Bahar // Sound: Leonard Sinclair // Post Video: Khairil M. Bahar // Post Audio: The Ark Studios // Translation: Copyleft Studio

An over-zealous public relations consultant advises the current minister of health how to discourage unhealthy lifestyles in Malaysia.
Seorang perunding perhubungan awam yang terlampau memberi nasihat kepada menteri kesihatan bagaimana untuk membanteras cara hidup yang tidak sihat di Malaysia.

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Read about Khairil Bahar
Watch The Making of Healthy Paranoia here or here
Main site: 15Malaysia
Producer Pete Teo's main Youtube Channel: RedBagMusic

(Info from 15Malaysia and Wikipedia Malaysia)

15Malaysia (12 of 15): Duit Kecil

2009-09-10T18:35:00.014+08:00

"Duit Kecil"
Director: Johan John

Official release date: 11 September 2009 (Youtube upload: 2008-08-25)
15Malaysia page // Youtube URL

Principal Cast: Nam Ron, Ilya Qastalanni // Supporting Cast: Lorna Hoong, Shuba Jayaratnam, Waheeda Sultan, Nur Shariena Hanim // Executive Producer: Packet One Networks // Producer: Pete Teo // DOP: George Lee // Editor: Johan John // Sound: Ah Soon // Post Audio: The Ark Studios // Translation: Copyleft Studio

A man finds himself without small change in a cheap brothel. Many arguments ensue and problems faced by the Malaysian common man are discussed humorously.
Dalam sebuah rumah pelacuran, seorang pelanggan terburu-buru meminta duit kecil dari para pelacur agar senang naik teksi kelak, lambat-laun membincangkan masalah inflasi yang dialami rakyat Malaysia.

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Read about Johan John
Watch The Making of Duit Kecil here or here
Main site: 15Malaysia
Producer Pete Teo's main Youtube Channel: RedBagMusic

(Info from 15Malaysia and Wikipedia Malaysia)

15Malaysia (11 of 15): Meter

2009-09-09T12:48:00.008+08:00

"Meter"
by Benji Lim & Bahir Yeusuff

Official release dare: 9 September 2009 (Youtube upload: 2009-08-26)
15Malaysia page // Youtube URL

Principal Cast: Khairy Jamaluddin // Supporting Cast: Amber Chia, Jason Lo, Namewee, Baki Zainal, Matthew George // Executive Producer: Packet One Networks // Producer: Bahir Yeusuff, Pete Teo // Director: Benji Lim // DOP: Benji Lim, Sebastian Ng // Editor: Sebastian Ng // Sound: Rabsel Yong // Post Audio: The Ark Studios // Translation: Copyleft Studio

The controversial head of UMNO Youth plays a taxi driver who is asked his views on some current Malaysian talking points. He ends up offering a keris to a Chinese boy as a gift.
Seorang pemandu teksi merengek tak henti-henti pasal keadaan bola sepak Malaysia, rakyat tidak memandang barat bahasa Inggeris, isu lompat parti…tanpa menyedari luahannya boleh mengganggu ketenteraman penumpangnya.

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Read about Benji Lim & Bahir Yeusuff
Watch The Making of Meter here or here
Main site: 15Malaysia
Producer Pete Teo's main Youtube Channel: RedBagMusic
Sebastian Ng translates Sinchew's "KHAIRY: IN PRESENTING NAMEWEE WITH THE KERIS AS A SIGN OF FRIENDSHIP, 'METER' DEMONSTRATES RACIAL HARMONY"

(Info from 15Malaysia and Wikipedia Malaysia)

15Malaysia (10 of 15): Gerhana

2009-09-09T01:31:00.002+08:00

"Gerhana"
Director: James Lee

Official release date: 7 September 2009 (Youtube upload: 2009-08-26)
15Malaysia page // Youtube URL

Principal Cast: Azman Hassan, Daphne Iking // Supporting Cast: Nam Ron, Soefira Jaafar // Executive Producer: Packet One Networks // Producer: Pete Teo // DOP: J. Ishmael // Editor: Jamil // Music: Ronnie Khoo // Sound: Ng Ken Kin // Post Video: James Lee // Post Audio: The Ark Studios // Translation: Copyleft Studio

Two secret lovers rendezvous in a plush hotel room while TV news is read in the background. A dark take on apathy in Malaysia.
Sebuah kisah pertemuan pasangan yang bercinta secara rahsia di sebuah hotel mewah sedangkan berita TV dibacakan sebagai latarbelakang. Suatu kisah gelap yang menggambarkan kekurang-minatan dan ketidakupayaan di Malaysia.

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Read about James Lee
Watch The Making of Gerhana here or here
Main site: 15Malaysia
Producer Pete Teo's main Youtube Channel: RedBagMusic

(Info from 15Malaysia and Wikipedia Malaysia)

15Malaysia (09 of 15): Slovak Sling

2009-09-09T01:28:00.002+08:00

"Slovak Sling: A Guide To Bribery"
Director: Woo Ming Jin

Official release date: 4 September 2009 (Youtube upload: 2009-08-25)
15Malaysia page // Youtube URL

Principal Cast: Patrick Teoh, Harith Iskander, Wong Chee Wai // Supporting Cast: Hariry Jalil, Ken Foong, Bee Seow Wei, Sue Liew // Executive Producer: Packet One Networks // Producer: Pete Teo // DOP: Wan Chun Hung // Editor: Woo Ming Jin // Sound: Lee Sim Lian // Post Video: Woo Ming Jin // Post Audio: The Ark Studios // Translation: Copyleft Studio

A comedic re-enactment of how one politician tries to entice another to switch party allegiance as DVD pirates look on.
Seorang pengedar DVD cetak rompak memerhati perbualan seorang ahli politik merasuah seorang ahli politik lain, agar dia boleh meniru gelagat tersebut untuk melepaskan diri dari serbuan polis

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Read about Woo Ming Jin
Watch The Making of Slovak Sling: A Guide To Bribery here or here
Main site: 15Malaysia
Producer Pete Teo's main Youtube Channel: RedBagMusic

(Info from 15Malaysia and Wikipedia Malaysia)

15Malaysia (08 of 15): One Future

2009-09-09T01:25:00.001+08:00

"One Future"
Director: Tan Chui Mui

Principal Cast: Tian Chua, Ida Nerina, Pete Teo (Narrator) // Supporting Cast: Cynthia Gabriel, Azman Hassan, Low Wai Sun, Oon Lai Keat, Lam Pooi Leng, Charlotte Lim, Diana Fernando, Sumining, Melissa Fernando, Noreen Joseph, Lee Kai Yin, Syed Harun, Muhammad Nazmi, Nikki Tok, Nor Aliya, John Teti, Albert Law, Christine Teti, Scott Issaac, Lee Ming Jun, Lee Yee Ling // Executive Producer: Packet One Networks // Producer: Pete Teo // DOP (stills) + Editor: Tan Chui Mui // Music: Ng Chor Guan //Post Audio: The Ark Studios // Translation: Copyleft Studio

An edgy and powerful science fiction story of a society where everything is perfect, except no one is allowed to speak.
Bayangan zaman akan datang, dalam masyarakat yang menikmati "kehidupan yang sempurna", kecuali diharamkan dari bercakap

Official release date: 2 September 2009 (Youtube upload: 2009-08-25)
15Malaysia page // Youtube URL

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Read about Tan Chui Mui
Watch The Making of One Future here or here
Main site: 15Malaysia
Producer Pete Teo's main Youtube Channel: RedBagMusic

(Info from 15Malaysia and Wikipedia Malaysia)

15Malaysia (07 of 15): Lumpur

2009-09-09T01:22:00.004+08:00

"Lumpur"
Director: Kamal Sabran

Official release date: 31 Ogos 2009 (Youtube upload: 2009-08-25)
15Malaysia page // Youtube URL

Principal Cast: Kamal Sabran // Supporting Cast: Aidid Abd Razak, Azman Mohd, Balan, Jeevindran, Lee Soo Hah, Loon, Nur Fatihah Afiefah, Pyan Habib, Qirian, Raja Singam, Soon, Vicknes, Yom Rafeah // Executive Producer: Packet One Networks // Producer: Pete Teo // DOP: Syaiful Tajuddin // Art Director: WAQ // Editor + Music + Post Video: Kamal Sabran // Post Audio: The Ark Studios // Translation: Copyleft Studio

A modern, poetic and beautifully constructed ode to Malaysia – its common people, places and enduring spirit.
Sebuah kisah moden, puitis dan ungkapan kata-kata indah yang mencerminkan Malaysia – masyarakatnya, tempat dan keindahan semangatnya.

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Read about Kamal Sabran
Watch The Making of Lumpur
Main site: 15Malaysia
Producer Pete Teo's main Youtube Channel: RedBagMusic

(Info from 15Malaysia and Wikipedia Malaysia)

15Malaysia (06 of 15): The Son

2009-09-09T01:18:00.002+08:00

"The Son"
Director: Desmond Ng

Official release date: 26 Ogos 2009 (Youtube upload: 2009-08-26)
15Malayasia page // Youtube URL

Principal Cast: Tong Yeon Choy, Leong Kuan Meng // Supporting Cast: Linda Salim, Datuk Zaid Ibrahim // Executive Producer: Packet One Networks // Producer: Pete Teo // DOP: Harold Goh, Andre Wan // Art Director: Bryan Ng // Editor: Mindy Wong // Sound: Guru // Post Video: Mirage Post // Post Audio: Fuse Audio // Translation: Copyleft Studio

A teenage Chinese witness to a racially motivated assault is being driven to the police station. A quiet reminder of the dangers of inter-communal suspicion and conflict.
Seorang remaja Cina dibawa oleh bapanya ke balai polis kerana menjadi saksi kepada perbalahan berbaur perkauman yang mengakibatkan si mangsa yang berbangsa Melayu berada dalam keadaan koma.

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Read about Desmond Ng
Watch The Making of The Son here or here
Main site: 15Malaysia
Producer Pete Teo's main Youtube Channel: RedBagMusic

(Info from 15Malaysia and Wikipedia Malaysia)

15Malaysia (05 of 15): Halal

2009-09-09T01:15:00.006+08:00

"Halal"
Director: Liew Seng Tat

Official release date: 24 Ogos 2009 (Youtube upload: 2009-08-24)
15Malaysia page // Youtube URL

Principal Cast: Adibah Noor // Supporting Cast: Chin Moi, Mark Teh, Sarah Lian, Danny Lim, Lee Kai Yin, Ahmad Yazid, Zan Azlee, Raymond Phathanavirangoon, Chin Khin Yeow, Chua Thien See, Wong Tuck Cheong, Ojan, Suddin Lappo, Ng Ken Kin, Kannan Thiagarajan, Fry Hew, Leroy Low, Euro Chee, Tan Chui Mui, Foo Fei Ling // Executive Producer: Packet One Networks // Producer: Pete Teo // DOP: James Lee // Art Director: Chin Khin Yeow // Editor: Liew Seng Tat // Music: Suddin Lappo // Sound: Soundwise // Post Audio: The Ark Studios // Wardrobe: Chin Khin Yeow, Charlotte Lim // Translation: Copyleft Studio

A very silly slapstick comedy demonstrating the proper Islamic way to slaughter chicken.
Setelah mengalami igauan yang amat dashyat, Adibah mengajar surinya Puan Ong cara menyembelih haiwan daging secara halal dengan cara yang gempak sekali.

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Read about Liew Seng Tat
Watch The Making of Halal here or here
Main site: 15Malaysia
Producer Pete Teo's main Youtube Channel: RedBagMusic

(Info from 15Malaysia and Wikipedia Malaysia)

15Malaysia (04 of 15): House

2009-09-09T01:11:00.003+08:00

"House"
Director: Linus Chung

Official release date: 24 Ogos 2009 (Youtube upload: 2009-08-15)
15Malaysia page // Youtube URL

Principal Cast: Varma Arasu, Sukarnia Venugopal // Supporting Cast: Sehnthan Arumugam, Ivan Song, Ryan Abdullah, Neo Soon Kian, Chiew Kin Wah, Mustapha Mahidin, Eddie Tuen, Yasmin Ahmad // Executive Producer: Packet One Networks // Producer: Pete Teo // DOP: Aaron Chung // Art Director: Dennis Teh // Editor: Linus Chung, Pete Teo // Sound: Sentil Muniady // Post Video: Linus Chung // Post Audio: The Ark Studios // Translation: Copyleft Studio

An Indian boy is asked to build a model of his house at school. A tale on the social economic plight faced by many Malaysians.
Seorang kanak-kanak India diejek di dalam kelas kerana mempamerkan model rumah idamannya yang tidak seberapa mewah berbanding rakan-rakan sekelasnya. Pada hari yang sama, rumah setinggan yang didiaminya bersama emak dirobohkan untuk memberi laluan kepada pembangunan.

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Read about Linus Chung
Watch The Making of House here or here
Main site: 15Malaysia
Producer Pete Teo's main Youtube Channel: RedBagMusic

(Info from 15Malaysia and Wikipedia Malaysia)

15Malaysia (03 of 15): Tree

2009-09-09T01:08:00.003+08:00

"The Tree"
Director: Amir Muhammad

Official release date: 21 Ogos 2009 (Youtube upload: 2009-08-14)
15Malaysia page // Youtube URL

Principal Cast: Y.A.B. Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat // Executive Producer: Packet One Networks: Producer: Pete Teo // DOP: Shan // Editor: Azharr Rudin // Sound: Hardesh Singh // Post Audio: The Ark Studios // Translation: Copyleft Studio

Malaysia’s most influential spiritual leader Nik Aziz offers commentary on the virtuous and Islamic way to conduct ethical commerce in his inimitable style.
Tazkirah yang disampaikan dengan caranya yang tersendiri oleh pemimpin rohani yang paling berpengaruh di Malaysia, Nik Aziz tentang cara berniaga yang beretika menurut Islam.

Torrent (please seed!):

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Standard 640x480 (28.9 MB) 15,264 downloaded

Mobile 480x360 (23.0 MB) 1,234 downloaded

ruumz 768x576 (227.9 MB) 46 downloaded

Read about Amir Muhammad
Watch The Making of Tree here or here
Main site: 15Malaysia
Producer Pete Teo's main Youtube Channel: RedBagMusic

(Info from 15Malaysia and Wikipedia Malaysia)

15Malaysia (02 of 15): Chocolate

2009-09-09T01:03:00.003+08:00

"Chocolate"
Director: Yasmin Ahmad

Release: 19 Ogos 2009 (Youtube upload: 2009-08-14)
15Malaysia // Youtube URL

Principal Cast: Sharifah Amani, Hon Kah Hoe // Supporting Cast: Tan Mei Ling // Executive Producer: Packet One Networks // Producer: Pete Teo, M. Effendy // DOP: Wong Chun Leong // Editor: Raja Affandi Raja Jamaluddin // Music: Pete Teo // Sound: Ad Audio // Post Video: Tiger Tiger // Post Audio: The Ark Studios // Translation: Copyleft Studio

A quiet tale that reminds us that, despite the multifaceted contradiction of Malaysia, life goes on – even if not all of it is sweet.
Kisah seorang remaja Cina cuba mempertahankan kemesraannya dengan gadis Melayu walaupun ditegah ibunya yang merungut akan ketidakadilan sosial di negara, mengingatkan kita bahawa walaupun berlaku pelbagai pertembungan di Malaysia, hidup tetap diteruskan, biarpun bukan selalunya manis.

Torrent (please seed!):

Torrent 640x480 (1.8 KB)

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Direct download:

Standard 640x480 (21.0 MB)

Mobile 480x360 (17.7 MB)

ruumz 768x576 (176.1 MB)

Read about Yasmin Ahmad
Watch The Making of Chocolate here or here
Main site: 15Malaysia
Producer Pete Teo's main Youtube Channel: RedBagMusic

(Info from 15Malaysia and Wikipedia Malaysia)

15Malaysia (01 of 15): Potong Saga

2009-09-09T00:59:00.009+08:00

"Potong Saga"
Director: Ho Yuhang

Official release date: 17 Ogos 2009 (Youtube upload: 2009-08-14)
15Malaysia page // Youtube URL

Principal Cast: Namewee // Supporting Cast: Teh Heong Khoe, Jimmy Lim, Chee Cheong Hoe, Sivaji Rajah, Radhii, Choo Poh Fong, Serena C, Atilia, Jay Menon, Diyana // Executive Producer: Packet One Networks // Producer: Pete Teo // DOP: Chong Seng Wah, Chia Tzyy Liang // Editor: Soo Mun Thye // Music: Ah Bot, Mō Sound // Sound: Hew Fook Ming // Post Audio: The Ark Studios // Translation: Copyleft Studio

A laugh-out-loud film about a Chinese boy’s misguided attempts at opening an Islamic bank account.
Filem jenaka tentang seorang pemuda Cina yang tersalah sangka bahawa dirinya perlu memeluk agama Islam dan mengamalkan cara Islam untuk membuka akaun bank Islam.

Torrent (please seed!):

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Standard 640x480 (49.3 MB)

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ruumz 768x576 (221.3 MB)

Read about Ho Yuhang
Watch The Making of Potong Saga here or here
Main site: 15Malaysia
Producer Pete Teo's main Youtube Channel: RedBagMusic

(Info from 15Malaysia and Wikipedia Malaysia)

15Malaysia: playlists

2009-09-09T00:44:00.000+08:00

15Malaysia: 15 short films about Malaysia

Embedded playlist player for 15Malaysia (English subtitles) video series:

Youtube description:

15Malaysia consists of 15 short films about Malaysia featuring some of the best known faces in the country including entertainers and politicians.

*The filmmakers featured:
Ho Yuhang, Yasmin Ahmad, Amir Muhammad, Linus Chung, Liew Seng Tat, Desmond Ng, Kamal Sabran, Tan Chui Mui, Woo Ming Jin, James Lee, Benji Lim & Bahir Yeusuff, Johan John, Khairil Bahar, Nam Ron, Jordan & Mussadique Suleiman

Embedded playlist player for the 'Making of' 15Malaysia series of videos:

Related links:
15Malaysia's Wikipedia Malaysia entry
15Malaysia in Ruumz
15Malaysia in Facebook
RedBagMusic (Producer Pete Teo's main Youtube Channel)
Aizat Faiz (one 15Malaysia's web developers)

Anugerah Skrin for Khairy?

2009-09-09T00:18:00.000+08:00

More 15Malaysia news from The Malaysian Insider:

Anugerah Skrin for Khairy?

Khairy plays a taxi driver in one of the 15 short films.

By Shazwan Mustafa Kamal

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 17 — It is not every day you hear the name Khairy Jamaluddin being mentioned followed by rounds of applause.

Then again, today’s event was no ordinary event. It may even have been historic to a certain degree, but one thing's for sure... it was certainly unique.

15Malaysia, a joint effort between 15 independent film-makers and Packet One Networks (P1), a wireless broadband company, had its official launch here today.

Teo (left), Datuk Zaid Ibrahim and Lai (right) at the launch of 15Malaysia. — Picture by Choo Choy May

Among the familiar faces present were actor Harith Iskandar, director Amir Muhammad, as well as Batu MP Tian Chua, who is the lead in one of the 15 films. ("One Future" by director Tan Chui Mui.)

“The films use us as material and try to put forward issues to the public,” said the PKR parliamentarian.

15Malaysia’s producer Pete Teo told the media that the films in the project deal not only with the issue of race relations but also various social and political issues faced by Malaysians today.

However, the question of whether these films will drastically alter people’s perceptions of issues is still uncertain.

“I dare not go so far as to say that things will change after watching these movies. The issue of racial conflict and tension requires more effort and time; the most this project does is to create a space for individuals to voice out their concerns and opinions,” quipped Chua.

The one condition the project required was that total "creative freedom" be given to the artistes and the directors, said Michael Lai, CEO of P1.

"15Malaysia is aimed at bridging gaps between the arts and broadband service," he said.

Tian Chua stars in one one of the 15Malaysia short films.

According to Teo, most of the films have already been picked to compete in international film festivals.

So how did Umno Youth chief Khairy fit into the picture? Although he was not present at the event, his portrayal of a lamenting taxi driver in "Interview With The Taxi Driver" by Benji Lim and Bahir Yeusuff has earned him lots of praise and applause.

A few people who attended the launch went so far as to say that if politics does not work out for Khairy, acting is definitely something he can fall back on. Indeed.

Starting today, three films will be released each week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday over five weeks — so go to 15malaysia.com to watch the films.

It's 15 Malaysia, not 1 Malaysia

2009-09-09T00:01:00.001+08:00

Pete Teo on the 15Malaysia project, from The Malaysian Insider:

It's 15 Malaysia, not 1 Malaysia

By Shazwan Mustafa Kamal

Singer-songwriter Pete Teo is undertaking a major project addressing the issue of racial politics. — peteteo.com pic

KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 16 — If you’re expecting to see or hear Pete Teo headlining any gigs sometime soon, you will be sorely disappointed. The singer-songwriter’s plate has been pretty full lately.

For the past three months Pete has been working hard on a secret project, something big, stupendous, major, gigantic, and enormous.

Yes, the project deserves to be shouted out loud. Subtlety does not go well with notoriety, especially if one wants to announce something significantly arresting and interesting.

Pete Teo, of course, is a veteran at taking on the difficult task of addressing a serious issue as racial politics with music and humour. His previous project, the collaborative song effort by Malaysia’s most renowned artists and performers, was MAFU (Malaysian Artistes For Unity) with its aptly-titled “Here In My Home” song and video.

If you thought that was inspiring, wait till you hear what Pete has to say about his latest venture, called 15Malaysia. It explores similar themes as MAFU, but this time around it utilises the medium of film to talk about a lot of things — food, race, politics, religion, bank loans.

Every little thing that Malaysians come across in their daily lives is touched upon here. No stone is left unturned.

Fifteen short films, directed by famous directors such as the late Yasmin Ahmad, James Lee, Amir Muhammad and Ho Yuhang as well as fresh faces like Liew Seng Tat and Johan John promise a Malaysian-ness like no other.

The Malaysian Insider recently spoke to Pete about the project which will be launched tomorrow:

Q: What inspired you to start this project?

Pete: Well it basically started shortly after the MAFU music video was released last year. I had many people come up to me and ask “Pete, what are you going to do next year?”

I also felt that on a certain level, there are limitations when it comes to making music videos. Short films are appealing, and it can be utilised to address issues. I mean I was not going to start a project where I would get people to carry the Malaysian flag and sing patriotic songs.

I believe that people have to be frank, and these are some of the issues that 15 young voices have successfully addressed in their respective films.

Q: How did you manage to gather so many directors and actors from such diverse backgrounds? Did you have a specific vision or idea in mind?

Pete: Well, it started with a handful of people who were basically winning awards overseas. They were the ones who formed the core of the project. A lot of these directors are underappreciated and tend to be more famous abroad than here in their own country.

There are also new faces too. I tried to get a big spread of people from different genres. It was quite an effort in the beginning to get people to participate.

Q: Were there any major obstacles along the way?

Pete: Not at all. Surprisingly the only real issue was some technical glitches, and trying to get the cast to pick a date to shoot, especially since some of them are influential political figures. (chuckles)

Q: That brings me to my next question. I’ve noticed that there are a number of famous politicians who took part in this project. Were there any differences in views/opinions made by the politicians during the course of production?

Pete: Absolutely not. You’d expect a politician to use this film space as a platform to boost their image, but none of them did. They were really supportive from both sides of the political aisle. At the end of the day the need to combat racism is much bigger than party politics.

Q: How long is each film?

Pete: On average each film runs to about 3-5 minutes.

Q: Did you oversee each film?

Pete: I was only involved in pre-production and post-production. I don’t go to every set because that would be counter-productive to the creative process.

Q: Which was your favourite film?

Pete: (Laughs) Watch the films and decide for yourself.

Q: Do you think films/songs can effect change, or an understanding of the current socio-political situation in Malaysia?

Pete: Not by itself. Film and the arts have the power to rally forces within society who want that change. It reaffirms values within a society.

It isn’t about changing the world. We’ve got 27 million voices in the country, and so far only 15 are heard. My job is to make this platform even bigger.

Q: How are the films going to be released?

Pete: The release runs from August the 17th right to September 16th, which is Malaysia Day. Each week we will release around three films on Mondays, Wednesdays as well as Fridays. Films will be made downloadable for free and viewable via YouTube.

Q: Last question. Do you think 15Malaysia promotes Malaysia’s current 1 Malaysia theme?

Pete: Well, if the idea of 1 Malaysia is one that strives for understanding, tolerance and unity, then yes 15Malaysia aims for that, too. But the idea of 1 Malaysia is not something new. It has existed for many years before and 15Malaysia is the avenue in which the underlying theme of cultural diversity can be explored and be better appreciated.

The S.I.G.I.T. – Black Amplifier

2009-09-08T02:56:00.004+08:00

Because The S.I.G.I.T. just fuckin rocks and they have a damn fine video:

The S.I.G.I.T. (Super Insurgent Group of Intemperance Talent) is a rock band from Bandung, Indonesia. "Black Amplifier" is featured on their 2007 album, Visible Idea of Perfection.

The above madness was produced by Brazilian motion maestro Renato Klieger (Indonesia + Brazil! --what a connection! More like this!)

Download links courtesy of No Fat Clips:

DOWNLOAD (HI RES): Black Amplifier
[Format: MPEG-4 - Size: 32 MB - Running Time: 3 min.]

DOWNLOAD (ALT.): Black Amplifier.
[Format: Ogg Theora - Size: 23 MB - Running Time: 3 min.]

WATCH: Black Amplifier in finestra.
[Formats: Flash Video, Quicktime]

LINK: Visita Renato Klieger.

LINK: Visita The SIGIT.

LINK: Pagina dei SIGIT su MySpace.

CODECS: Ogg – Flash

More links:
Renato's Youtube channel and the original URL for the clip above

PlaMeeKon (A Little Piece of Memory)

2009-09-08T02:42:00.003+08:00

2007, 9min 13sec, Colour , Animation

Country : Thailand

Director : Sittitsak JIAMPOTJAMAN
Script/Producer/Editor : Sittitsak JIAMPOTJAMAN

Sittitsak Jiampotjaman graduated from Silpakon University in decorative art visual communication. His other animation films include Circle (2006) and The Stain (2006).

Yet another shameless re-post from the terrific No Fat Clips:

PlaMeeKon (A Little Piece of Memory) tells the story of a grown up men who doesn’t believe in his childhood dream anymore, the dream being to find a hairy fish… A casual meeting will bring him back on track.

The soundtrack is comprised of: La redecouverte by Yann Tiersen; Through the Window (from Swing Girls Original Soundtrack); Omoi no anata by Mami Ishizuka (from Kimagure Orange Road related CD Madoka’s Piano Files).

DOWNLOAD: Scarica PlaMeeKon.
[Format: MPEG-4 - Size: 21 MB - Running Time: 9 min.]

DOWNLOAD: Scarica PlaMeeKon.
[Format: Quicktime - Size: 21 MB - Running Time: 9 min.]

WATCH: Guarda PlaMeeKon su Photobucket.
[Format: Flash Video]

LINK: Visita Stain Film, sito di Sittitsak Jiampotjaman.

BLOGGER: Visita il blog di Sittitsak Jiampotjaman.

CODECS: Apple Quicktime – Flash

Jiam, aka Sittitsak Jiampotjaman, contact info:

Web : www.stainfilm.com
Blog : http://jiam.exteen.com
EMail : notjiam@gmail.com

OK.Video Militia: WHAT GOES WITHOUT SAYING

2009-09-07T04:18:00.006+08:00

video information
produced by ruangrupa
directed by Cyka
websites: RuangRupa & OK.Video
produced: 2007/06/30
duration: 2 minutes 27 seconds

Changes in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta, central Java. From the OK.Video 2007 festival.

Download Hi-Res / Screening Version (23.5 MB)

All info from EngageMedia. Original URL link.

OK.Video Militia: Tamasya Reklame (Advertisement Tour)

2009-09-07T03:35:00.007+08:00

video information
directed by Singgih AP
websites: RuangRupa & OK.Video
produced: 2007/07/01
duration: 1 minute 50 seconds

Video from the OK.VIDEO Jakarta International Video Festival 2007. This video was produced during the OK. Video Militia workshop in Semarang, held at the Yaitu Art House, involving two other communities: Videot and Kronik Film. Yaitu Art House is a contemporary art gallery, Videot community is a group of art students form the State University of Semarang, and Kronik Film is the Students' Activity Unit of the Diponegoro University. Eighteen participants took part in the workshop; most of them were students or artists.

(ENGLISH) The low-lying region of Semarang is known as the Lower Town and often suffers from flood, which in some areas is caused by seawater overflow. The southern part of Semarang, which lies on high land, is known as Upper Town. Semarang has the art of warak ngendhog and dugdheran, held around the Moslem fasting month of Ramadan. The Chinese community of Semarang, through the community of Kopi Semawis (the Community of Semarang's Chinatown for Tourism), often holds the Semawis Market, a fair selling miscellaneous food of Semarang. This is such a big Chinese community which helps grow the economy, trade, and tourism in the city, that the city of Beiha in southern China proposes to be Semarang's 'Sister City'. Semarang has the slogan of 'ATLAS' (literally means 'map' but is actually an acronym for the Indonesian words meaning Safe, Orderly, Smooth, Beautiful, and Healthy). Aside from it, Semarang is a city actively preserving the heritage building and maintains the traditions and constructions it retained from the Dutch and the Chinese. Some of the heritage sites are still preserved and become tour destinations, as well as locations for various Indonesian films.

(BAHASA-INDONESIA) Dataran rendah di Semarang dikenal dengan nama Kota Bawah dan sering dilanda banjir yang disejumlah kawasan disebabkan oleh luapan air laut (rob). Bagian selatan Semarang yang berupa dataran tinggi dikenal dengan sebutan Kota Atas. Semarang memiliki seni budaya warak ngendhog dan dhugdheran yang diadakan menjelang bulan Ramadhan. Komunitas Tionghoa di Semarang, melalui perkumpulan Kopi Semawis (Komunitas Pecinan Semarang untuk Pariwisata) sering mengadakan Pasar Semawis, yakni pasar malam yang menjual berbagai makanan dan oleh-oleh khas Semarang. Komunitas Tionghoa ini cukup besar dan turut memajukan ekonomi, perdagangan, dan pariwisata, sehingga terjadi sebuah penawaran kerjasama dari kota Beiha (kota di selatan Cina) untuk mengadakan program "Sister City" dengan Semarang. Kota Semarang memiliki slogan sebagai kota ATLAS (Aman, Tertib, Lancar, Asri, dan Sehat). Selain itu, Semarang adalah kota yang aktif memelihara tradisi "bangunan kota lama" serta tradisi dan peninggalan Belanda dan Cina. Beberapa situs peninggalan itu masih ada dan menjadi tempat tujuan wisata, juga lokasi berbagai pembuatan film Indonesia.

(ENGLISH) The OK. Video Militia workshop in Semarang was held at the Yaitu Art House, involving two other communities, i.e. Videot and Kronik Film. Yaitu Art House is a contemporary art gallery, while the Videot community is a group of art students form the State University of Semarang, and Kronik Film is the Students' Activity Unit of the Diponegoro University. Eighteen participants took part in the workshop; most of them were students or artists.

(BAHASA-INDONESIA) Workshop OK. Video Militia di Semarang dilakukan di Rumah Seni Yaitu, dengan melibatkan dua komunitas lainnya, Videot dan Kronik Film. Rumah Seni Yaitu adalah sebuah galeri seni rupa kontemporer, sementara komunitas Videot adalah kelompok mahasiwa senirupa dari Universitas Negeri Semarang, dan Kronik Film adalah Unit Kegiatan Mahasiswa Universitas Dipenegoro. Workshop diikuti oleh delapanbelas peserta yang mayoritas adalah mahasiswa dan seniman.

(ENGLISH) The workshop in Semarang produced ten video works. Mari Berhitung Leo (Let's Count Leo's Way) is about the unique way that a shop has to counting how much its customers have spent. Koma (Comma) and Sugeng Enjang (Good Morning) tells of the history of the old town, while Urban Traffic recounts the road activities that the youth have on Saturday night. Tamasya Reklame (Advertisement Tour) is about the huge number of advertisements along Semarang's main road. Support Your Local Alcohol is about the favorite drink of youth in Semarang. Icon tells of the buildings in Semarang, while Semarang Underwater and Rob (Seawater Overflow) are experimental video works combining reality, history, and the city in a distinct way.

(BAHASA-INDONESIA) Workshop di Semarang menghasilkan sepuluh karya video. Karya-karya video itu adalah Mari Berhitung Leo, tentang keunikan cara menghitung belanja di sebuah warung. Koma dan Sugeng Enjang, tentang sejarah kota tua. Urban Traffic, tentang kegiatan anak-anak muda di jalanan pada malam Minggu. Tamasya Reklame, tentang banyaknya reklame di sepanjang jalan utama Semarang. Support Your Local Alcohol, tentang minuman kesukaan anak-anak muda di Semarang. Icon, tentang bangunan di Semarang; Semarang Underwater dan Rob merupakan video eksperimentatif memadukan realitas, sejarah dan kota dalam visual yang sangat berbeda.

Participants: Adin, Anggita Putri, Anton, Damar, Diah Sekar, Ferintus, Gita Kriska, Khori, Putri Amanda, Nahyu, Nunu, Ratri, Ridho, Rizki, Rofikin, Shesa, Singgih AP, Wulandari
Mentors: Charles Tirayoh & Ari Dina Krestiawan

Download Hi-Res / Screening Version (17.5 MB)

DOWNLOAD OGG THEORA VERSION HERE
DOWNLOAD VLC PLAYER HERE TO VIEW OGG FILES ON ANY PLATFORM

OK.Video Militia: Choir

2009-09-07T03:10:00.004+08:00

video information
directed by Brian Genie, Robet M. Syarif, Dimas Djunaedi, Maulani Gani
websites: RuangRupa & OK.Video
produced: 2007/06/06
duration: 6 minutes 30 seconds

From the OK.VIDEO Jakarta International Video Festival 2007. This is a poetic video produced during the OK. Video Militia workshop in Depok which was held alongside with the punk community and the community of street children who like to hang out at the New Depok Station.

(ENGLISH) Depok is the supporting area of the capital city of Jakarta. Situated right on the south of Jakarta, between Jakarta and Bogor, since April 20, 1999, Depok has been designated as a municipality that is distinct from the Regency of Bogor. When it was only an administrative district in 1982, Depok had only 240,000 people, and when it became a municipality in 1999, it already housed 1.2 million people. Many of the older areas in Depok are remnants from the colonial time, and the people still living there are often called 'Depok Dutch'. These areas are being marginalized now. The economic growth of the town is thanks to its existence as an industrial and shopping area, as well as education provider. The presence of the University of Indonesia and the Gunadharma University, with such a huge number of students, make the town lives on the students-related economic activities.

(BAHASA-INDONESIA) Depok adalah penyangga ibu kota Jakarta. Terletak tepat di selatan Jakarta antara Jakarta-Bogor, sejak 20 April 1999, Depok ditetapkan menjadi kotamadya (sekarang: kota) yang terpisah dari Kabupaten Bogor. Ketika masih menjadi kota Administratif pada 1982, penduduknya hanya 240.000 jiwa, dan ketika sudah menjadi kotamadya pada 1999, penduduknya menjadi 1,2 juta jiwa. Banyak kawasan tua di Depok berupa peninggalan kolonial, dengan warga keturunan yang sering disebut Belanda-Depok yang masih banyak tinggal di sana, sebuah kawasan yang saat ini mulai tergusur. Gairah ekonomi di kota ini, selain sebagai kawasan industri dan pusat perbelanjaan, adalah sebagai kawasan pendidikan. Hadirnya Universitas Indonesia dan Universitas Gunadharma dengan jumlah mahasiswa yang besar, membuat kota ini hidup dari bisnis yang berkaitan dengan keperluan mahasiswa.

(ENGLISH) Workshop in Depok was held alongside with the punk community and the community of street children who like to hang out at the New Depok Station. The community called themselves 'Box House', a name that emerged during the workshop. Seven people participated in the workshop, which took place on May 15 and 16, and resumed on June 3 to June 6, 2007.

(BAHASA-INDONESIA) Workshop di Depok diadakan bersama komunitas punk dan anak-anak jalanan yang sering berkumpul di Stasiun Depok Baru. Komunitas ini menamakan diri Rumah Kotak, nama yang lahir saat workshop video diadakan. Workshop yang diikuti oleh tujuh orang peserta ini berlangsung mulai 15-16 Mei, dan dilanjutkan kembali 3-6 Juni 2007.

(ENGLISH) The majority of the video works resulting from the workshop talk about train-related activities. Nine of them are: Mau ke Mana? (Where're You Goin'?), Re-load, Pulang – Pergi (Coming and Going), Un-incident (arrival-departure on the train), and De-Ja-Vu; all talk about trains and the community surrounding them. Meanwhile, Sarkem (Pasar Kemiri) (Kemiri Market) talks about the life in the market and the vendors who start coming there from three in the morning. Then there is a poetic video, Choir. There is also a video about a construction from the colonial era, Djembatan Panoes "Riwayatmu Kini" (The Panoes Bridge "Your Story Thus"). Last, there is also the video Dalam Kotak, di Dalam Tralis (Within Box, in the Bars), which is a highly experimental work about the visuals and the reality. Most of the video works show the close relationship between the participants and their immediate environment: the train station.

(BAHASA-INDONESIA) Video-video yang dihasilkan mayoritas membicakan kegiatan yang berhubungan dengan kereta api. Sembilan karya video yang dihasilkan antara lain: Mau ke Mana?, Re-load, Pulang-Pergi; Un-incident (arrival-departure on the train) dan De-Ja-Vu, berbicara tentang kereta api dan masyarakatnya. Pada Sarkem (Pasar Kemiri), video ini berbicara tentang bagaimana keadaan pasar dan pedagangnya yang mulai hidup dari jam tiga pagi. Kemudian ada video yang puitik, yaitu Choir. Ada pula video mengenai bangunan sisa-sisa zaman kolonial, yaitu Djembatan Panoes "Riwayatmu Kini". Terakhir, adalah Dalam Kotak, Di Dalam Tralis, sebuah video yang sangat eksperimentatif mengenai visual dan realitas. Sebagian besar video ini memperlihatkan kedekatan partisipan terhadap ruang lingkup hidupnya: stasiun kereta.

Participants: Asep Tatu, Brian Genie, Dimas Djunaedi, Doddy Badja, Maulani Gani, Muhammad Syarif, Rizqi Nirmala
Mentors: Ari Dina Krestiawan & Mahardhika Yudha

Download Hi-Res / Screening Version (36.8 MB)

DOWNLOAD OGG VERSION OF VIDEO HERE

ferment/// videograms for your daily revolutions

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Eloi Hernandez interviews Ed Cabagnot

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Review: At The End of Daybreak

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Mutant Media: Essays on Cinema, Video Art and New Media by John Conomos

“In Between” the Moving Image

Mutant Media:Essays on Cinema, Video Art and New Media by John Conomos

review by Sean Lowry

Endnotes

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lihat nada

ChitraKarKhana: Khirkeeyaan

Baul Without Boundaries

Dictionary of War: Piracy

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ANACBANUA trailer

Yasmin Ahmad’s Films: facts about Amir Muhammad’s new book

Radioactive Sago Project: Alcohol

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ABSTRACT

Mapping spectral tropicality in The Maid and Return to Pontianak

ABSTRACT

Tropical Hong Kong:

ABSTRACT

Tropics, city and cinema

Urban geography as pretext:

ABSTRACT

Moris Rasik (parts 1 & 2)

Cinemascope #40: Amir Muhammad on Yasmin Ahmad

Deaths of Cinema | The Sweet and the Bitter: Yasmin Ahmad

By Amir Muhammad

Martyn See's Top 100 Political Videos

“We are formed by our own cultural stereotypes which causes us to miss the changes.” - Tian Chua on 15Malaysia

15Malaysia (15 of 15): Rojak!

15Malaysia (14 of 15): Lollipop

15Malaysia (13 of 15): Healthy Paranoia

15Malaysia (12 of 15): Duit Kecil

15Malaysia (11 of 15): Meter

15Malaysia (10 of 15): Gerhana

More:

15Malaysia (09 of 15): Slovak Sling

More:

15Malaysia (08 of 15): One Future

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15Malaysia (07 of 15): Lumpur

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15Malaysia (06 of 15): The Son

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15Malaysia (05 of 15): Halal

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15Malaysia (04 of 15): House

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15Malaysia (03 of 15): Tree

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15Malaysia (02 of 15): Chocolate

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15Malaysia (01 of 15): Potong Saga

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15Malaysia: playlists

Anugerah Skrin for Khairy?

It's 15 Malaysia, not 1 Malaysia

The S.I.G.I.T. – Black Amplifier

PlaMeeKon (A Little Piece of Memory)

OK.Video Militia: WHAT GOES WITHOUT SAYING

OK.Video Militia: Tamasya Reklame (Advertisement Tour)

OK.Video Militia: Choir

Mutant Media:
Essays on Cinema, Video Art and New Media
by John Conomos