ShoutOUT! First Takes for the month of April

First Take Playlist for the month Of April

Screening Schedule:

SLAYER / ANWAR WU / 8 MIN / 2009 / TBA

A young average girl stumbles upon a man dressed in white, bleeding profusely, and strives to help him. Little does she know that a mysterious man in black will include her in his hunting spree.

Anwar is a Singaporean of both Malay and Chinese descent. A graduate from MDIS in 2008, with an Advanced Diploma in Mass Communications, he is currently pursuing his degree in film, at Lasalle College of the Arts.

SUNSET / EZZAM RAHMAN / 2 MIN / 2010 / TBA

December, a flight ticket, a digital camera, a quiet moment = result.

Sunset is part of a series of short experimental “visual sketches” collected by the artist in his travels.

Ezzam Rahman is a practicing multi-disciplinary artist and an accidental filmmaker. He recently completed his Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Fine Arts from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, University of Huddersfield. He was formally trained in LASALLE SIA College of the Arts. As an artist, he has participated and co-curated numerous local and international group exhibitions, events and festivals. His works vary from the choice of medium, concepts and strategies of presentation. Ezzam also enjoys talking to himself, and smiles to sleep..

TRIO DEKIL (TRIO) / GHAZI ALQUDCY / 40 MIN / 2010 / TBA

Three boys try to escape poverty by heading to the city to form a band. The journey of them being discovered leaves their mother all alone at home.

Trio Dekil was produced as part of the director’s objective while participating in the Jatiwangi Artists in Residence Festival (JARF 2010). The director conducted a scriptwriting workshop with the educators and acting workshop with the elementary school theater club. With the script from the educator, he works with the fifteen kids to produce the film that was inspired from an open source street song.

Ghazi Alqudcy enjoys telling stories through digital film. His works vary in its approach – from fictional narratives, to documentaries, to experimental projects. Thematically, Ghazi has touched on issues of sexuality, spirituality, and death. During his free time, he loves to indulge himself in a slumber party with his friends and that is how he usually gets inspired. Currently his motto is, ‘ Buy less t-shirts and do more films’.

First Take

Monday 4 April, 8pm
The Substation Theatre
Entry By Donation

Presented by The Substation Moving Images

ShoutOUT!: FIRST TAKE IS BACK!

After a month of hiatus,

SUBSTATION'S FIRST TAKE IS BACK!
And here's the playlist for FEBRUARY FIRST TAKES

First on the list is
CANDID SHOTS OF YOUTH AT PLAY / ATHALIA HO / 5 MIN / 2010 / PG

Two boys bring a dead body to an open field. Its disposal does nothing to remove the memory of its existence and its ceasing. A poetic film about young men and their own inability to deal with their consciences, their anxiety towards the world, and their loss of innocence.

Athalia Ho graduated from Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s School of Film and Media Studies with a Diploma in Film, Sound and Video in 2008. She had consistently been making films with her cellphone—films that have never been and never will be released—before finally deciding to commit this style of filmmaking to a proper form with her short film, Candid Shots of Youth at Play.

BACKYARD BOWLER / AMANDA TAN / 12 MIN / 2009 / PG

Backyard Bowler is the story of a man, Tim, reminiscing about his life in his final moments as lung cancer debilitates him. We experience his trials, mistakes and somewhat self-constructed predicaments as he struggles to keep afloat.

Amanda Tan graduated from the School of Art, Design and Media at the Nanyang Technological University with a degree in Digital Filmmaking. Her work has been screened at festivals such as the Singapore Short Film Festival and the 2009 Salento International Film Festival in Italy.

A GREEN TICKET / S ANOOPRIYA / 8 MIN / 2010 / PG

A coming of age story about ten year old Ming and the choice he has to make of how to spend his savings.

S Anoopriya is a graduate from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts with a Diploma in Design and Media. She has written and directed several shorts in school.

YOU DISAPPEAR / HAKYM NOH / 8 MIN / 2010 / PG

Her loved ones have died tragically, the shock and grief makes her retreat from reality. In her mind, this harrowing event never took place and instead, she hopes to seek happiness. She escapes into a world that exists in her imagination and finds her way towards her own disappearance. Beyond the dreams and fantasies, the film depicts a world of alternative existence, reflecting the overwhelming confusion and grief that leads to her eventual release.

Hakym Noh was born in 1992 in Singapore. He has completed five shorts so far, and also dabbled in photography. You Disappear is his most recent short.

I MAKE T-SHIRTS / STEPHANIE BOUSLEY / 10 MIN / 2010 / PG

Rick Shamus writes (what he thinks are) hilarious t-shirts.

Stephanie is in her final year of Masters of coursework at NYU School of the Arts Asia. She likes making funny, weird, low budget films.

SQUARE SHAPED / ZEN / 6 MIN / 2009 / PG

Adam is a very organised person and felt that there was nothing wrong with his obsession; until his new secretary came along, disrupting his structure of life. He tried making adjustments but later understood that what was missing in his life was not the structure, but human touch.

This is Zen’s first film.

MOUTHEAD / MICHELLE CHEONG / 3 MIN / 2010 / PG

This short is about is dinner date which goes horribly wrong…

Michelle Cheong is currently pursuing a degree in fine arts at NTU, School of Arts, Design and Media, majoring in film. Her upcoming project is her thesis final-year project entitled Pixel.

First Take
Monday 7 February, 8pm
The Substation Theatre
Entry By Donation

Presented by The Substation Moving Images

'Scot Free' by Chia Pei Zhen

The sensationalistic hook of Scot Free's synopsis makes the film seem much worse than it actually is. That sounds like damning praise, I know. But when you sell your film on the basis of two French tourists in Singapore accidentally killing someone and trying to dispose of the body, you do it at the expense of belittling your film's intelligence and subtle ambitions. Thankfully, wedged between the blood-slathered Vengeance: The Death Wish and Director's Cut in the Substation's First Take June screening, Scot Free couldn't get off with its comparatively muted killing, allowing its laudable attempts at comic absurdity (however few and half-successful) to shine through.

See, the ballyhoo'd killing in the synopsis only happens around the halfway mark; if you're waiting for it, the stuff before that might feel like a dreadful bore. If you shed those preconceptions, though, it becomes apparent that Scot Free is trying to be a lot freer with where its plot could run up to that point, and even after. The initial sight of the two French tourists in a cut-rate hotel lobby, one of them asking for directions to "westearn foood", prepares us for another stale fish-out-of-water story where the tourists are no more than conduits for the filmmakers to sniff and sneer at the more "exotic" aspects of our local culture. And this does happen somewhat, notably when they end up at an Indian food joint, and one of them wrinkles her nose as curry is plopped onto their plates.

But it turns out that Scot Free has more up its sleeve, especially when it comes to the nose-wrinkler of the duo (on the right in film still). As they talk over the food, she drops a few hairline surprises—surprises to us, anyway, because of our false preconceptions: The baby we thought she was worrying over in an earlier phone conversation turns out to be something else. She mentions a man she's bringing home for Christmas, but then tosses off a joke that lets us realize they're not romantically involved. She makes a remark that has us assume she is accepting of queer folk, but then she curtly protests when her friend refers casually to a male-to-female transsexual as a "she". These might not amount to much for other viewers, especially with the uninspired shot/reverse-shot editing and the actresses' slightly inorganic line deliveries, but I found that these conversational revelations prepared me to be surprised by where the story would take me.

Certainly, if not for the synopsis, I wouldn't have been prepared for a drunk German tourist stumbling into their hotel room at night, and it's even funnier that the actor playing him does it in a kind of fazed, slow-mo walk, rather than an angry zombie lurch. But let's not place all blame on the synopsis, because the film also falls prey to that now-clichéd trick of starting at the end before looping back to the events that got them to that point. This doesn't work for Scot Free because, as I have suggested, the film relies most on projecting a certain unpredictability to whatever happens next.

Nonetheless, it manages to avoid not preparing us too much for the tourists' instinctive, alternative use of a local fruit; or the choice of vehicle they flag down to flee the law; or the mishap that the vehicle itself gets into, suggested mostly by the briefly-espied sight of a spinning bicycle wheel; or the way that it never seems like the police are even after them at all. Near the end, there's even a brief tender moment when one of the tourists offers to take the blame for the other, even though it's unsolicited and we get the feeling they weren't that close to start with, and it's a tiny injection of feeling into the scattered bits of chaos. I wanted more, a lot more, and given how I leave some films wanting none of it, that's not at all a bad thing to ask.

'Scot Free' was Chia Pei Zhen's graduate thesis film at Ngee Ann Polytechnic. It was screened as part of Substation's First Take this month, and was among the Singapore Panorama Shorts slate at the Singapore International Film Festival last April.

'Vengeance: The Death Wish' by Ting Shin Mei

Asked why she chose to make a horror film for her final-year project, director Ting Shin Mei replied that the genre allowed for "more effects", which made it "more easy to score". One can only stand in awe of such brutal honesty, so rare among filmmakers eager to champion their films' depth. Nor could one have better summed up Vengeance, whose appeal lies solely in its lurid effects. The film pulls out the usual low-fi horror tricks: long takes on soon-to-be victims with an open doorway in the background; rapid match cuts from various women to the "angry ghost" that replaces them; bloody make-up and half-obscured angles that simulate the "ghost's" knife carving into her victims' skin.

If these money shots depict the vengeance of the title, the film's attempt at a "story" supplies its death wish. Vengeance starts not too dissimilar from a traffic awareness ad, as a woman running across the street gets knocked down, cutting to a close-up on her pocket watch. The same watch winds up on the shelf of some odds-and-ends store: no wonder some customer actually (gasp!) wants to buy it, despite the storeowner's insistence that it's not for sale. (Perhaps he feels self-conscious about lifting items off traffic-accident victims and putting them up for display.) When the customer persists that the storeowner should name a price, any price, a bald man walks over and warns her not to buy it. At this point she should have listened; I certainly would heed any omen uttered to me in a thrift store by some random bald man, though I'd suspect that he's eyeing the same object for himself, or that the two are in cahoots to fleece me for more than it's worth.

But the genre being what it is, she buys it anyway. This triggers the easy-to-score effects-laden scenes to which Ting referred, as the woman transforms through a simple cut into the "angry ghost" and tortures and kills the guy in the bedroom with her. And then, with no clear explanation, the timepiece finds its way into the hands of some other woman: rinse and repeat. There's no rhyme or reason to why these men die or who these women are; after the screening, one viewer actually asked who they were, and while the director claimed some relationship with a later character, none of it is evident from the film. Nor does it matter. The pulse of a schlocky horror film like this comes from how it makes us wince, and as the ghost drives a scalpel into her victim's skin, it achieves this goal just fine.

Yet there are other moments where we wince for the filmmaking, such as when the ghost, having carved a word onto her victim's face, asks him if he can see what she's written. It's a rhetorical question, of course, and she makes a huge fuss about bringing out a hand mirror. You'd think this would lead to a horrifying reverse-image in the mirror, but then she just tells him. "H! A! T! E!" Like a cheerleader gone wrong. The campy-ness of the whole thing undercuts the horror, so the only thing we're thinking when we finally get a full look at the ghost's handiwork is that her penmanship is pretty good.

Really, given the filmmakers' avowed reasons for making the film, it's the last kind of film that needs any pretense at a connective story, and is the worse for it when it tries. As it turns out, the ghost's last target is some guy she used to bed, and her pocketwatch was the "heirloom" he bequeathed to her (and yes, he calls it his "heirloom", in undubbed English). Fleeing from her ghost, he takes refuge in a multistorey carpark and dials not the police, but his pastor. Better, the ghost extermination service pastor turns out to be the same random bald man who was skulking around in the thrift store earlier. The pastor proceeds to vanquish the ghost with some inappropriate cross of Christian catechism and voodoo-ish hand-waving, and then absolves the guy of his sins in a church that looks suspiciously like a lecture hall.

Later, when asked what she thought about the audience's laughter in her horror film, Ting gave perhaps the classiest response that this situation could afford: "Maybe it's a failure for a horror film... but I'm glad that everyone was entertained." Entertained we might have been, but no more than we would otherwise for a film that weren't, in more ways than one, so "easy to score".

Ting Shin Mei is a graduate from Singapore's Institute of Technical Education (ITE). 'Vengeance', her final-year project, won Best Director and Best Editor in ITE's graduation showcase. It was screened as part of Substation's First Take this month.

First Takes Jan 2010 - Mummy by Teh Zhi Yuan

Fly-By-Night, the annual video challenge is a great platform to make a statement. You've got only 48 hours, don't do elaborate plots, don't do multiple locations. It seems stationing yourself at a point and making it intense seems to work better. 

A state of coma, in a bathtub full of ice, the final scene evokes a unnerving sense of regret and helplessness. But not without the ironic string of statements about the relationship between mummy and son. Gliding through the furniture and objects that make up the bathroom, the camera establishes a immediate level of intimacy between us and the character (yet to appear). The bittersweet statements suggesting motherly love makes you more and more uneasy and the camera seems to closing up on the final subject in the bathroom.

Nothing gets more painful when it is immeasurable and sublime like this. It is fortunately on YouTube. Enjoy!

  

First Takes Jan 2010 -Fighting Fit by Sulaiman Salamon

This is the 1st Film which gave me an impression of "HUH?! That's it?" situation.
But it is an interesting theme to play with.

It is a common issue where young men will inflict personal injury onto himself to avoid being assigned to infantry unit for 2 years of National Service.

After long verbal fight between the 2 of them,the action to personal injury is committed and everything ended with all the vulgarities at the background noise which attracts me during the credit roll.

So...There's consequences when you intend to make the wrong action.You will Regret along the way,even before the action is done.

Fighting Fit touches on the psychology of wanting something so badly that one is willing to inflict pain upon oneself to achieve his goal.

First Takes Jan 2010 - Singapore Satire by Joshua Ng & Faridah Saad

An initial impression of ‘Singapore Satire’ may sound like this: If not for the juicy topic and the rich montage of film excerpts from local movies, this documentary might have been an equivalent of a video representation of a Wikipedia entry. It was too linear in its approach. Its only purpose seemed to be to inform. In fact, it seemed very fit for ChannelNewsAsia. I was proven wrong at the end because it did leave the audience with moments of surprise and even a question to think about. 

A rich montage of personalities and film excerpts made the film, just like how the still from 'Talking Cock' the movie made the still for this documentary film (to the extent of misleading me a little). The plethora of personalities spanned writers, humorists, professionals and researchers. To be cheeky, even the stranger who dug

 his nose while walking towards the camera stole a few moments. Through their perspectives, definitions and sometimes, strong stands on what is satire and what's the state of satire in Singapore, we get a good sense of the breadth of satire that can be seen in Singapore. I guess this showed how thorough the team was in getting the best people to be interviewed. I like what they mentioned during the Q & A: every rejection for an interview spurred them to find even bigger personalities. 

What's interesting is also that if I thought about how satire is defined in this documentary, then about 70% of Singapore films, plays, TV shows, skits are satirical in nature. Wang Sa Ye Fung skits were satires. Jack Neo films are satires. It is all around us. But surely not many people would think Singapore accommodates enough free speech. So where is the answer in this paradox? This was what I probably took home with me from this little film (the answer came from writer Kirpal Singh)......There are satires that penetr

ate and leave you slightly disturbed (like 'Singapore Gaga') and there are satires that just take the mickey out of situations but also finish with a happy ending (like the many stage plays we see). Between 'The Blue Mansion' by Glen Goei and 'Singapore Rebel' by Martyn See, there is a huge huge gap, even though both are satires.

Well done on a well-researched documentary! One sad thing to note though: it is noticeable that many well-researched docus have been made under school 'assessed modules'. Wonder if they will continue to make such painstaking efforts again after graduation...

Latest : Cashless bagged the "Best Of First Takes"Award

Best Of First Takes: Cashless(First Takes：November) by Derek and Melinda Tan


Special Mention Award:(S)439956 by Elgin Ho(First Take:February)
(Unfortunately, Elgin could not make it for the 2nd Session Of Best Of First Takes.But that's a Good News to him.)