I was at one of the final stops on the annual film festival calendar, the 28th edition of the Singapore International Film Festival that, under the able stewardship of executive director Yuni Hadi, remains one of the most efficiently run events.
It was a tale of two contrasting songs in terms of films that I watched. Like many delightful films before it, Indian producers refused to acknowledge the merits of Anup Singh’s Rajasthan-set fable The Song of Scorpions , starring the luminescent Golshifteh Farahani, Irrfan Khan and Waheeda Rehman, and did not invest in the film. And the ones that evinced interest wanted to Bollywoodise it. India’s loss then. Consequently, the film is a France/Switzerland/Singapore co-production and was shown as a special presentation at the festival. Anup revealed to me that his next film will be Lasya – The Gentle Dance and will star Irrfan again, completing a trilogy with the actor that began with Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost (2013).
The other song was Thai filmmaker Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s Samui Song , a film that I have watched again and again this year across festivals, simply because it can be interpreted in so many ways — the film that keeps on giving, as it were.
One of the special guests at the festival was French-Vietnamese filmmaker Tran Anh Hung, who has made several memorable films including The Scent of Green Papaya (1993), Cyclo (1995) and Norwegian Wood (2010). I was delighted when he told me that his next film is going to be about food. Based on French food writer Marcel Rouff’s 1924 treatise The Passionate Epicure , Dodin-Bouffant is all set to start soon.
Also taking the culinary path was Indonesian filmmaking legend Garin Nugroho who took the audience on an insightful illustrated journey across his processes while delivering a master class. He likened his life philosophy to the popular Southeast Asian dish Nasi campur, where a dollop of boiled rice is surrounded by various side dishes on the same plate. There is no particular order in which to consume the dishes and it is entirely up to the diner how she wants to eat it. Nugroho said that he was not a big fan of the traditional system of the starter, main course and dessert and would rather go this way.
Nugroho is quite the philosopher. About filmmaking he says, “To me, every film is similar to a plant, with its roots to find its own water. Water is like a film funding – every movie has its own source of funds and its own soil to grow. Then filmmaking is preserving thoughts and beliefs and thoughts are like the roots of the tree, and it will seek its own water.”
The ever-dependable Shekhar Kapur delivered the other master class. Later, over a linguini aglio-olio lunch at Singapore’s National Museum café, he revealed his plans for his upcoming Bruce Lee biopic. And, as we are both road warriors, we spent an inordinate amount of time discussing the most portable productivity technologies.
Naman Ramachandran is a journalist and author of Rajinikanth: The Definitive Biography, and tweets @namanrs.
