movies ~ Have Soul, will travel

Have Soul, will travel
Locally-produced films can have global appeal, too
TODAY Weekend • March 29, 2008

Kenneth Tan

SINGAPORE'S British Film Festival, which ran from 1984 through 2004 and became one of the country's most successful movie events, once featured a movie called The Reflecting Skin, directed by Philip Ridley.
It was a beautiful, moving story about a young boy's coming of age. My "partner-in-crime", Lena St George-Sweet (the then Arts Director of the British Council), and I noticed that the end credits showed significant involvement of Canada — Ontario, specifically — and could, de facto, make the movie appear to be an odd choice for a "British" festival.
"But Mr Ridley was born in the UK," she calmly said to me.

Movie talent has become increasingly mobile and accepted across geographical, cultural, and linguistic borders, especially in the last two decades or so.

The likes of Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh, Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi (on camera), and John Woo, Ann Hui, Stanley Tong and Wong Kar-wai behind the camera have made big waves Hollywood and around the world.

In the early 1980s, the "Hong Kong/Asian New Wave" cinema movement saw young home-grown directors such as Hui returning home from renowned international film schools to apply their new-found directorial skills in movies with uniquely indigenous themes.
Perhaps Lee Ang's The Banquet and Chen Kaige's Farewell To My Concubine will be ones most readily remembered that marked the period in which Asian cinema talent truly gained international attention and recognition.

Since the 1990s, we have seen increasing Asian representation on prestigious international film festival juries — Maggie Cheung in Berlin in 1997, and Zhang Ziyi in Cannes in 2006. Japan and South Korea have also enjoyed explosive growth in international appetites for their feature film output.

In many parts of Europe, locally-made movies are making waves abroad as well.
The challenges are no different from those we face here — dialogue needs to resonate, actors need to appeal, and subtitling requirements vary considerably from market to market.
European film personalities have become household names around the world. Lasse Hallström's My Life as a Dog and ABBA The Movie made him famous in my heart; his The Cider House Rules won him a worldwide fan club.

Then there's Helen Mirren, Daniel Craig and not forgetting Terminator- Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who originally hails from Austria.

In the "Australasian" belt, luminaries like Australia's Nicole Kidman and Peter Weir, and New Zealand's Sam Neill and Peter Jackson have put their home countries on the world cinema map in ways that could not have even remotely been imagined when they first started out.
How many of us remember that Nicole's very first film was BMX Bandits, made when she was 15?

Hollywood movies are usually considered least needful of "help" in internationalisation, but even the good ol' US of A as a country of origin does not automatically guarantee cross-border prosperity.

What are the critical success factors apart from the obvious ones like star appeal, strong production values, and a compelling storyline?

The British Film Institute once defined a "British movie" as one made in or by the UK which could not have been made the same way in or by any other country.

Universal connectivity starts with being true to one's roots. Royston Tan's 881 has its detractors. But it did not match Ratatouille's local box-office results by fluke. 881 portrayed and evoked something so deeply ingrained in the consciousness and culture of Singaporeans that we all voted with our bums and dollars, filling those cinemas week after week.

881 was Singapore's official submission for the Oscars. Arclight Films, which distributed the multi Academy Award winning Crash, has now signed 881 for world distribution.

Can Hollywood and the rest of the world make a movie with better production values and wider appeal than 881? Of course they can. But no country could have made 881 the way Singapore, did.

Mira Nair's feature debut, Salaam Bombay!, was about and for India — and look how far that film and Ms Nair have travelled.

One pitfall to avoid, though, is excessive pandering to the perceived whims of too wide an audience base. The first Babe was a runaway hit around the world because it was what it was — without pretension or "engineering".
The sequel, Babe: Pig in the City, tried too hard (in my opinion) to please everybody — there were so many more characters; the film was much darker; the emotions seemed more contrived.

Have soul, will travel. At a Singapore-hosted party in Cannes two years ago, a jubilant Jack Neo gave me a bear-hug and said – almost in tears himself — "Kenneth!! Today I screened I Not Stupid here! Ang moh also cry!!"


The writer is Chairman of the Singapore Film Society.