Singapore Chinese Film Festival Review

Spoilers only - since most of you may never watch them anyways

That week, I learnt that cinema is кино (kino) in Russian, which is short for кинотеатр (kino-theatre). Cinema was like theatre and had indeed become more like theatre, a communal space where people hold their suspension of disbelief, following a story live. There’s no fast forward, no pause, no replay. The pauses are built into the movies, as your fellow audience fidget, yawn, munch on the noisiest snacks, or worst of all, struggle to break open plastic packaging at the quietest time.

With the closure of Projector last year in Singapore, cynics lamented the death of arthouse / indie cinema. Those who know, have Mubi. Those who don’t, watch Netflix(?). Which makes me wonder if anyone goes to the cinema these days. But I was proven wrong when I walked into the Singapore Chinese Film Festival with two equally committed friends - committed enough to sacrifice entire weekends to the dark. Most of the screenings were packed. It was lucky that three of us plotted a coordinated plan to study the complex festival schedule, and managed to get all the tickets for films that interested us. It was unlucky that our choices were extremely grim and heavy. Bleak pessimism, it turns out, is not monopolized by French cinema.

For instance, Butcher’s Wife, which is apparently a classic in Taiwan, did not have a single happy moment. The orphaned girl of a widow was married off to a butcher who lives in an otherwise serene seaside town. The wife was abused, starved, ostracised. Resorted to the proverbial Chekhovian cleaver.and executed her husband. Watching the butcher pour pig innards over his poor wife did not exactly turn us into vegetarians, but it did shrink my appetite quite significantly. For once, Hollywood-style soapy happy endings seemed appealing, and I was amazed by the director’s unflinching creativity in depicting human brutality.

I suppose that also meant that the festival had a good chronological spread, including films such as Butcher’s Wife which was filmed in 1983 (less than a decade after the film Empire of Passion).

Despite the grim and grittiness of it all, I did enjoy a few aspects of the showcase.

One is the strong female characters, plus a clearly feminist undercurrent in quite a few films. A Foggy Tale (大濛) featured a young girl leaving her village to collect her brother’s body in 1950s, during the White Terror (which I knew little about), basically an era of extra-judicial killings and enforced disappearances by the ruling party KMT. The brother had been executed by KMT. It was never clear why or how he was executed. The accusation against him was perhaps completely unsubstantiated.

Uneducated and alone, she navigated a corrupt bureaucracy to recover his body — nearly kidnapped, nearly scammed out of her brother's watch, nearly forced to bribe her way into the mortuary. When she finally found him, he was floating in a hospital tank of formaldehyde, beyond recognition. She brought him home anyway. At her lowest point, shared with an estranged sister, standing beside that formaldehyde pool, she begins counting time forward — a trick her brother once taught her, a way of fast-forwarding to a future where things get better.

The Butcher’s Wife / A Woman’s Wrath (杀夫) was ahead of its time. A critical commentary of how societal expectations and patriarchal traditions seek to contain and stifle female desires. The Butcher’s wife was orphaned after her widowed mother committed suicide out of shame, when she was caught by the family for trading sex for food. She was married off to a butcher, the era of men that consider sex as part of a wife’s marital obligations. she found no tenderness in other women who actively ostracised her, interpreting her screaming during sex not as a cry for help, but as enjoyment of sex.

I am shocked by the number of times I have used the word “sex” - given that this movie was filmed in 1983 - as an outspoken piece against patriarchy, and how both men and women were complicit in enforcing it. My wishful thinking is that no animal was hurt in the making of this movie.

At the time of the festival, my favourite was Linka Linka (一个夜晚与三个夏天). A Tibetan film made by a Tibetan director, about a Tibetan director returning to Tibet to make a film about her coming-of-age story. Bildungsroman style, growing up in Lhasa/Shanghai. The movie-within-a-movie structure is not new, neither is the Lalaland-esque homage to film making. Coming of age stories are just more relatable. Samgyi left Tibet since High School to study in Shanghai, started dressing like any other Han teenagers, had an estranged childhood friend. When Samgyi met the friend again in Lhasa during holidays as adults, the said friend was going through a divorce. I am about the same age as the adult Samgyi, and every time I go back to Guiyang, it feels like another friend has gone through the life cycle: marriage, parenthood, divorce, rinse and repeat. Sometimes it seems that you have not changed, but the place has changed. Other times, it feels like the place is exactly what it has been, but you have changed.

The main relationship was that between Samgyi and her dad. Her dad who always loved her, similarly a film director. Love which does not dissolve intergenerational tensions, or dissipates the unspoken expectation that she need to and must find stable employment. Like Samgyi, I guess I grapple with my dad’s persistent doubt as to whether I can make it as an independent. The laid-back third-tier city life also makes me wonder whether I could re-settle back into a calmer rhythm.

Unlike Linka Linka, Life of Luosang is a Tibetan film made by a Han Chinese, Mandarin-speaking director. It did not feature any young people dancing away in a club featuring the Potala Palace in the backdrop. It was a full-on third-person perspective on harsh Tibetan village life and restorative justice. Forget about calling an ambulance when you are trying to give birth in the middle of a mountain. While there is some degree of romanticisation of the Tibetan landscape, the focal point was the inter-family dispute and how families deal with grief and forgiveness.

Luosang’s granddaughter was run over by a drunk Drolma and half-paralysed. Luosang was determined to send Drolma to jail. Drolma was repentant. But if he goes to jail, his two children would be orphans. Drolma’s sister seems to be the only medic in town, who found herself pregnant, stuck with a husband who always felt the need to assert his status as the ruler of the household.

The entire movie was in Tibetan, i.e, I understood nothing. The translations sometimes make me wonder whether I am missing out on the nuances, or if people just speak in a highly dramatic way in Tibet. In our post-screening discussion, a friend raised a fair point - the film is guilty of a certain outsider's gaze. The visuals are arrestingly beautiful, drawing on a decade of footage the director had accumulated while living in Tibet. There's something in the way we Han people (or in my case, half Han people) look at Tibetan culture and spirituality - with reverence, even romanticisation - while simultaneously trying to understand the sheer brutality of living within it.

I suppose judging from all of the above, the running theme is family drama. Even in the most explicit lesbian movie I have watched in the history of my movie-binging, Girlfriends, family drama took the centre stage.

Family Matters (我家的事) is, well, about a family. The film was sliced into four sections, narrated from the perspectives of each of the 4 family members. Sister found out that she was adopted and felt lied to. Mother struggled to conceive, but found a creative solution to use dad’s closeted friend as a sperm donor, after realising that she was not the problem. The narrative then jumps roughly fifteen years to the younger brother's perspective, by which point the father has died. The brother, job-hunting before army enlistment, crosses paths with his biological father — the closeted friend, now running a motel. The biological dad lied about his CV to the staff to justify hiring the young man as a manager in the motel. This did not end well. But the younger brother took back his biological father’s suit, which fit him perfectly. He hung the suit in an empty bedroom, but seemed to be spooked by the room.

And this is when the last Act toggled back to the Dad’s perspective - the past, and how he eventually killed himself in that room. Father struggled with gambling issues, was laid off, fought with the wife, estranged from his son, saw visions of their past family life, and took tons of pesticide. Again, I made the point earlier that we picked extremely grim movies. Not to mention an immigrant’s story of struggling to survive in New York, so grim that I realized I did not need to see it. Though the title was deceptively happy - 幸福之路 - the road to happiness.

Taiwanese cinema (thinking back to Yi Yi as well) excels at capturing family melodrama with nostalgic tenderness. The colour palette was never dull, rich with symbols that mirrored the narrative arc. Before the dad died, he left an unfinished mural in the family home. Bright yellow squiggly lines traversed the wall, mirroring the sister’s childhood drawings of them as a family, holding hands before a sunrise. His story ended abruptly, unfulfilled wish to break down the walls in his family. The very walls he had erected with his incompetence and insolence. But you can’t help pitying the dad, as life chipped away his confidence.

Interestingly, this movie didn’t pass censorship in Hong Kong, so we had the privilege of watching it here. Though I truly cannot fathom why this movie would violate censorship rules?

In the same category as family melodrama is Girlfriends (女孩不平凡), a coming-of-age story of a Macau-born director’s torrential love affairs through the ages. She had her lesbian awakenings when she crossed path with a fashion designer, who might or might not have been queer. The unreciprocated love led her to apply to

She applied to university in Taiwan, was toxic and non-committal with a Taiwanese girl who was ready to move to Macau for her. Years later, she wound up with a Hong Kong girl, who not only wanted to get married but wanted to have kids with her. As said, it was shockingly explicit for a Singaporean audience. A few uncles and aunties either yawned next to us, or were completely taken aback. Like me, they probably did not read the synopsis.

All the girls / girlfriends were fundamentally good people - trying to get it right, trying to grow up, trying to find a love that is most honest to who they want to be and become. It was not a dull movie. But it did leave me wonder what my takeaway was. Perhaps it was the last relationship that left her resolute to commit to a relationship that is bigger than herself, where she could build a future with someone who was equally invested in her.

If anything, the human relationships woven through these films, despite the doom, the grief, the brutality, illuminate something generous in the human heart. Even the most despairing films were not entirely without hope, or without a genuine yearning toward it.

A broader reflection I had was what Chinese cinema really meant. None of the movies (that I watched) was entirely in Mandarin Chinese. I clung onto the subtitles. A few movies were entirely in Taiwanese Hokkien. Which sounded much more pleasant than the harsh Hokkien swear words I hear in Singapore. Two were in Tibetan. But if anything, it does expand an otherwise parochial definition of what being Chinese means, especially amongst the overseas-Chinese diaspora. No singular linguistic identity. No monotonic ethnic identity either. But perhaps what reunites us are the unspoken familial expectations, the grief we face but cannot articulate, the social norms interlacing like labyrinth we circumnavigate, searching for Ariadne’s thread.