Branching into meta territory are these four films—from Mexico, Indonesia, Iran and Singapore—about filmmaking. There are documentaries: an inside look into an auteur shooting his best work, and a French filmmaker who shot Singapore’s first four fiction films. There is fiction, with Richard Oh’s satirical look at a filmmaker in creative limbo. And of course, something that straddles both worlds: when a casting call attracts five times the expected number of applicants, Mohsen Makhmalbaf decides to turn the casting interviews into the film itself.
1. Melancholy is a Movement
28 Nov, Sat / 2:00pm / National Gallery Singapore*
*Filmmaker in Attendance
This deadpan comedy spoofing Indonesia’s hypocritical film industry is not only entertaining, but is also a timely observation of the absurdist cycle of life. Starring filmmaker Joko Anwar as a fictionalised version of himself, one who is lost, disillusioned, and stuck in creative limbo. A meeting with a film producer eventually led to his latest film, an absurdist, existential drama set in heaven. But despite the film’s commercial success, the aching melancholy and aimlessness still resides within him.
2. Following Nazarin
28 Nov, Sat / 7:00pm / The Arts House*
*Filmmaker in Attendance
Following Nazarín is a documentary that retraces director Luis Buñuel’s steps as he was making Nazarín, often regarded by Buñuel himself as his best work. The film merges the director’s own personal knowledge of the film with a trip down memory lane, accompanied by pictures displayed for the first time: whether those he took in the film scouting as well as those taken during shooting by Manuel Alvarez Bravo. The film also presents us with masterful shot-for-shot recreations of Nazarín’s landscapes but in colour, an ingenious update to Buñuel’s black and white photography in the ‘50s.
The result is a documentary that elegantly explains how Buñuel discovered poetry through imagery and how Mexico affected this Spaniard’s religiosity, forging the paradoxical “atheistic but spiritual” ethos.
3. Gaston Méliès and His Wandering Star Film Company
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5 Dec, Sat / 7:00PM / National Gallery Singapore*
*Filmmaker in Attendance
Filmmaker Gaston Méliès, brother of the more widely known filmmaker Georges Méliès, is often neglected in cinematic history. While Georges worked within the studio, manipulating the cinematograph to create illusions, Gaston brought the cinematograph across the ocean. In 1912-1913, Gaston and his film crew embarked on a journey of a lifetime through the Asia-Pacific – from Polynesia all the way to Japan – where he shot more than 64 fiction and non-fiction films.
Gaston spent the month of January 1913 in Singapore, filming in Chinatown, Little India and Pasir Ris, making what could be the first fiction films shot in Singapore: His Chinese Friend, The Poisoned Darts, A Chinese Funeral, and A Day at Singapore, all of which are presumed lost. This documentary utilises archival footage – surviving images and footage of his films and journey – to trace his voyage, contemplating its significance to the advent of cinema.
4. Salaam Cinema
5 Dec, Sat / 7:00PM / National Museum of Singapore
In this direct exercise in meta-fiction that reconfigures documentary and fiction, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, this year’s SGIFF Honorary Award recipient, advertises a casting call for his new film about the centenary of cinema. He prepared 1,000 application forms but 5,000 people turned up, resulting in a riot. What follows is a series of casting interviews with a few dozen willing actors, which Makhmalbaf decides will be the film itself.
The casting interviews play out much like an interrogation, a vigorous analysis of Iranian society and its desires through the voices of its people. As the power-relations between director and actors spin like a pendulum through their pointed conversations, and the act of truth and lying becomes more uncertain, a certain authenticity and intensity of cinema emerges evidently before our eyes.