stranger eyes 👁️‍🗨️📹👁️

FOTO: Christopher Wong / Akanga Film Asia

happy to share that i'm coproducing and script consulting 杨修华 (Chris) Yeo Siew Hua's upcoming feature film, Stranger Eyes《默视录》!

the surveillance thriller stars a personal hero, 李康生 Lee Kang-Sheng, who only keeps getting more magnetic; 巫建和 Wu Chien-Ho, the blistering son in A Sun《陽光普照》, for which he was nominated for a Golden Horse; newcomers 林幻夢露 Anicca Panna and 娜娜 Xenia Tan; veteran 陳雪甄 Vera Chen (Boluomi); and 張子夫 Pete Teo, the legend from Malaysia himself. read the Variety report here: https://variety.com/2023/film/news/yeo-siew-hua-stranger-eyes-lee-kang-sheng-1235699479/.

it's been a looong journey, and will finally begin again in 2024 when the film's ready. special shout-out to Raymond Phathanavirangoon's dearly missed SEAFIC x Produire au Sud (of Festival des 3 Continents, coordinated by Guillaume Mainguet), where we first developed this project in 2016–17. thank you for believing in us and for your patience.

watch out, or be watched, for more!

derek malcolm – 100 years of cinema

FOTO: Derek Malcolm's Facebook

after growing up reading his incisive, pithy reviews of "world cinema" in the Guardian then the Evening Standard, i met Derek Malcolm at the Bengaluru film festival in 2018. he was there as a FIPRESCI jury member (and former president), i was there as a (former) NETPAC member; we hung out between film screenings, walking slowly to the smoking point for cigarettes and light.

i was impressed that at the age of 86, he was still travelling to Karnataka yearly in search of "Third World cinema", as he called it, and was still in touch with the latest films (despite his understandable hatred of contemporary cinema); i was even more impressed that he spurned all the festival staff's kind but obsequious attention (he was clearly the VVIP amongst all of us) and that he showed me the British middle-finger sign within seconds of us being introduced and multiple times afterwards, in the funniest ways possible.

we kept in touch over email, but i'm sorry we never got to see each other again. he belongs to a generation of arts critics that stood in the centre of culture, made a fine career of it, but never wanted the attention – how fitting that his passing was announced on the same day as Jane Birkin's. starting out as a horse-racing jockey then correspondent, he always kept his sense of humour, self-deprecation, and wit, and prioritised underappreciated cultures. they say you should never meet your heroes, but he was the kindest, most loveable curmudgeon. i will miss him and still want to be like him.

vale and rest in power, mr. Malcolm x

on hampshire road

today's 718 days – nearly two years – since migrant-worker dormitories were gazetted as “isolation areas”. around 300,000 men are still under lockdown, banned from mixing with "the community", as the $ingapore government terms non-dormitory, non-visiting residents. this means these labourers are transported to work on the back of life-threatening lorries, then straight back from the construction site or shipyard to their overcrowded, remote dorms. their one off day a week is spent here too.

in the video "Hampshire Road" (2019) by Min-Wei Ting, a camera tracks and bobs across the "cage-like" barricades of a bus terminal in Little India, from left to right. from gaudy emptiness exposed by overhead, overpowering fluorescent lights (the better to see you with, and for you to know you're being seen), a few men, then so many, are captured from the bay of the bus they're waiting for. they carry groceries for the week ahead, bound by untrusting stores in cables ties; some sit on the floor, resting, exhausted, forever waiting and wasting; hands hold on to the fence, which is at eye level and thus completely useless except for panopticon effect; faces confront the camera at uncomfortably close length, glaring, confused, tired, used to being looked at by the state and all its actors (you and me).

the grand reveal (if any) to me isn't the outsized carceral forces at the end (the ones so easily humiliated in the so-called Little India Riots), but the darkness and emptiness of Sate Kelinci Pak, the park at the junction of Northumberland Road and Hampshire Road. here is where low-wage south asian migrants, particulary bengali, used to gather every sunday, eating and drinking, sending money home, just being. it's one spot of relative freedom (which, of course, the state must label with a sign indicating "fun") in the past, when freedom of movement – even just walking down a road, and looking, regarding, seeing and being seen – was still something migrants could have.

first shown as part of the Berlin Art Prize 2019 nominees' show, "Hampshire Road" ends its streaming on Vdrome, as introduced by Christie Cheng, today: vdrome.org/min-wei-ting