Wednesday, 22 September
6:30 p.m. – Korean Studies Auditorium

Singapore, 2008 (75 min)
Tamil with English Subtitles
Director: Eric Khoo
Cast: Francis Bosco, Jathisweran, Grace Kalaiselvi

SYNOPSIS
Francis (Bosco Francis) is a man at the end of his tether. The former magician often takes solace in the bottle and barely ekes a living as a cleaner in a nightclub. He has a 10-year-old son he desperately loves, but sorrow, guilt and constant inebriation have made him an ineffectual father. The son (Jathishweran) is a stoic old soul who has learned to bury his affection for his old man and to cope with his chaotic life.

A broken spirit and a single parent, Francis hopes to redeem himself and win his son’s love and respect. He makes a painful – and bizarre – return to magic. An unexpected incident one night sets father and son on the road. In a dilapidated building, these two wounded souls come to terms with their love which is as deep and acute as their grief.

THE BACKGROUND
ERIC Khoo’s new movie My Magic addresses issues of love, life, family ties, redemption and magic. The filmmaker describes it as his most personal piece of work to date.

“I’m a dad myself and for the longest time, I’ve wanted to do a movie about a father and son, the obstacles in their relationship, and how they get together despite the difficulties,” says Khoo whose four boys are aged between 8 and 14.

It is also inspired by lead actor Bosco Francis, a real-life magician whom he has known for more than a decade.

The director says: “This guy is larger than life. I wanted to do something with him, and for him.” He roped in journalist Wong Kim Hoh to work with him on the script. The two old friends have collaborated on Khoo’s last two projects: Be With Me, a moving omnibus feature which opened the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in 2005; and No Day Off, a short film about the trials and tribulations of a maid, which has been shown to critical acclaim in various festivals.

“Kim Hoh and I have been talking about the project for some time but we were sidetracked by other ideas.” However, in late 2007, Khoo started reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a Pulitzer prize-winning novel about the adventures of a man and his son in a post-apocalyptic world. “The book inspired me to nail the project down,” Khoo says. He did, within two short weeks. “It is my fastest shoot to date. Kim Hoh was in India for work but I’d send him ideas and he would flesh them out. We finished the script in a couple of days,” he adds.

In the meantime, he had already assembled a crew including Adrian Tan, the cinematographer who also lensed Be With Me. Workshops were also arranged for Bosco and Jathis, the young actor playing his ten-year old son. “The workshops were crucial because I wanted them to establish a rapport and to be comfortable with each other. They were fantastic. Jathis was a god-send, he was so natural.” says the director.

Bosco, meanwhile, was Khoo’s “Rock of Gibraltar”. “Many of the stunts he performed in the movie are real. Bosco wouldn’t have it any other way. We had to shoot most of them in one take, because I couldn’t afford to have him too hurt and injured.” Although a 12-day shoot was planned, My Magic was shot in just nine days. “The cast and crew were just so good. They ran with me.” From the outset, he wanted My Magic to be a “small, sensitive project.” “I didn’t want to go big and be extravagant with the execution. I wanted it to be intimate, personal and subtle.”

Shooting it, however, was not without its challenges. A major one was language. The movie is shot mostly in Tamil, a language alien to him and Kim Hoh who wrote the script in English. “Since both Bosco and Jathis are Indian, I wanted them to speak in their mother tongue because it is more authentic,” says the director whose previous movies were mostly shot in a mixture of English and Chinese dialects. Fortunately he has a “saving grace”, supporting actress Grace Kalaiselvi, who became the film’s resident translator. The hardest part of the shoot, however, was the ending. “I wanted My Magic to be layered, and to spring surprises. The ending is the most important. It is what will take the film to another level so we spent a lot of time conceptualising it, and getting it right.”

He adds: “Many of us are judgmental. If there is one lesson I hope viewers will take with them after watching this movie, it is that things and people are sometimes not what they seem.’ -taken from zhaowei.com

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Wednesday, 1 September
6:30 p.m. – Korean Studies Auditorium

Philippines 2003 (120 min)
Tagalog with English subtitles
Dir: Maryo J. De Los Reyes
Screenplay: Michiko Yamamoto
Cast: Lorna Tolentino, Albert Martinez, Gloria Romero, Celia Rodriguez, Mark Gil, Tonton Gutierrez, Jiro Manio, Amy Austria, Cherry Pie Picache, Isabella de Leon

Inay (Lorna Tolentino) speaks for many when she says, ”Life is a never-ending misery.”

Her 7-year-old daughter, Helen (Isabella de Leon), has cerebral palsy, has never spoken a word and requires as much care as an infant. Her teenage son has lost his scholarship and come home from Manila to an uncertain future. Her other son, 9-year-old Magnifico (Jiro Manio), doesn’t show much promise beyond being a really sweet kid. Her beaten-down husband (Albert Martínez) has been working on the same Rubik’s cube for a year.

And she has just learned that her mother-in-law, who lives with them, has pancreatic cancer. That’s one more helpless person to care for, and they have no idea where they’re going to get the 30,000 pesos or so (several months’ salary for a schoolteacher, we are told) it will take to bury her.

But the hopefully named Magnifico, in the tradition of omniscient innocents in international films, is determined to help — and to charm everyone the way movie characters occasionally do, just by treating impending death matter-of-factly. He sets out to earn enough money for his grandmother’s funeral, buy her a beautiful white dress to be buried in and gather enough scrap wood to build the coffin himself. But this drama isn’t as maudlin as it sounds, thanks to the leading actors’ fine, understated performances. (Anita Gates, New York Times)

Magnifico was awarded Best Feature Film at the Hawaii International Film Festival (2003) and the Deutsches Kinderhilfswerk Grand Prix at the Berlin International Film Festival (2004). It is being shown here with a new subtitle track produced by Brigida Schmidt, a student in our Spring 2010 subtitling course.

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Wednesday, 3 February
6:30 p.m. – Korean Studies Auditorium

2007, 84 Minutes
English, Mandarin, Chinese dialects (English Subtitles)

Director: Teo Eng Tiong
Cast: Yvonne Lim, Bernard Tan, Liang Tian, Steve Woon, Louis Lim

Television producer Renee Donovan (Yvonne Lim) and her cameraman (Bernard Tan) are assigned to investigate the high incidence of deaths in a poor neighbourhood. Her boss wants a sensational story but Renee is more concerned about finding a mysterious poor old woman. In her search for truth, she is forced to deal with her own past from which she ran away ten years ago. The drama builds up suspense that culminates in a shocking climax. Facing the truth can be a daunting task, but ignoring it is merely an act of self-deception. The film examines the dark side of life in Singapore’s public housing – the old and the poor living in the crevices of a modern and increasingly materialistic society. Truth Be Told was awarded the Best Original Film In Competition Award at the 5th Asian Film Festival of Rome in 2007. -Toronto Singapore Film Festival

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Friday, April 24, 12:00., Moore Hall 319 (Tokioka Room)
Presented by Sutraphorn Tantiniranat, Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant at the University of Hawaiʻi

This is a study of images of Thai women presented in a Thai TV drama series shown in 2004 entitled “Saloeybaab”. Broadly, the study explores how the drama presents its female antagonist as well as the protagonist. Both characters fall into the binary opposition of the “bad” and the “good” woman stereotypes respectively. More specifically, the researcher discusses the purposes and the meanings of the presentations. Negative images of the female antagonist reflect that Thai society still values the notion of “kulasatri” or the “ideal” woman as can be seen from ideologies on women attached to the story. The attitudes towards Thai women reinforce the power structure of Thai patriarchal society where women have been controlled by social rules and norms through the process of socialization including the mass media.

Sutraphorn Tantiniranat earned an M.A. in English from Chiang Mai University, Thailand. She has been teaching English at Mae Fah Luang University, Chiang Rai Thailand. Her areas of interest are Foreign Language Teaching and Women Studies. She is currently a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant at the Thai Language Program at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Wednesday, 23 January
6:30 p.m. – Korean Studies Auditorium

Directed by Enison Sinaro
Indonesia, 2007, 120 min
Indonesian and English with English Subtitles

Inspired by the terrorist bombing which killed over 200 people in Bali in December 2002, LONG ROAD TO HEAVEN weaves together the stories of three characters who live through the planning, execution and aftermath of the attacks. Banned by Balinese officials from being filmed or even screened in Bali, the movie, written by Singaporeans Andy Logam Tan and Wong Wai Leng, calls militant jihad into question while trying to provide some insight into how the planners viewed their efforts to lash out at the West…and how victims had to deal with their own prejudices and blind hatred of Islam following the attacks.

As Indonesian poet and film critic Nuruddin Asyhadie noted about the film, “Long Road to Heaven can be seen as a message to viewers that we need more than understanding to stop terrorism or violence. We must first reconcile with ourselves and step away from our own egos. Only then we can go meet ‘the other’ without any preconditions.”

Please join us for light refreshments following the film!

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