coming of age

At 21 years, the Singapore International Film Festival comes of age with a whole new section "Singapore Panorama" with 17 titles by Singaporean filmmakers! I'm glad the SIFF has persisted.

Someone at work had observed that in 2015 it would be our island's 50th national day as a republic and the Padang and City Hall would need to be used for a really elaborate national day parade. 2015 that would make it the 28th Singapore International Film Festival. At that instant, I was thinking that the 28th SIFF would strangely make me far happier and "proud" to be a resident of this island.

Anyway, such fuzzy "sense of belonging" aside, Us amps missed most of the films we bought tix for last year, but we are determined to make it for these screenings this year:




Singaporean filmmakers Tan Siok Siok's documentary Boomtown Beijing, Abdul Nizam Hamid's documentary on P Ramlee's cinematographer Kerongchong for Pak Bakar and the collective effort of 7 Lucky 7.
[photos from the SIFF website]













And these documentary and ficition films about jazz musicians in Indonesia (Teak Leaves at the Temple), Bob Dylan (I'm not There), photographer Anna Leibovitz (Annie Leibovitz: Life Through the Lens by her sister Barbara), my nationalist hero Sun Yat Sen set in this city(Road to Dawn) and weirdos in Canada (Brand Upon the Brain).

It's still not too late to get tickets online via the festival's website or at Sistic counters.

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