S ingapore was the penultimate stop on my global film festival circuit. Apart from the films and networking, an invaluable part of film festivals are the in-conversation events and masterclasses, where the audience can absorb the experiences of legendary filmmakers and actors. Singapore proved a rich vein in this regard.
I was lucky enough to get a front-row seat at the Fruit Chan masterclass. The venue was the perfectly preserved and maintained 1887 Palladian architecture building that is the National Museum of Singapore. A self-taught man, Chan has variously been an actor, director, second unit director, assistant director, producer, writer, editor, and production designer and production manager. However, he found global fame as a director.
Chan’s journey is fascinating and inspirational. He had very little opportunity to watch movies during the Cultural Revolution era in China’s Hainan province. When he moved to Hong Kong at a young age, Chan was a veritable sponge and watched everything he could. That’s why, unlike many independent filmmakers, Chan is refreshingly free of any artsy pretensions, and his films, despite tackling serious themes, are extremely entertaining.
During the masterclass, Chan recalled with a chuckle how, as a habitué of the annual Hong Kong Film Festival, fellow filmmakers would openly ridicule him, wondering whether he understood the range of artistic work on display.
Perhaps because I am of a scatological bent of mind, or just plain bent of mind, the first Chan film I saw was Public Toilet (2002), in Rotterdam I think, followed by his segment in Three… Extremes (2004). As is normal practice, I went back in time and caught up with his body of work, with my favourite being Made in Hong Kong (1997), his cinematic reaction to Hong Kong’s troubled reunion with China.
As happens with most good filmmakers, what his recent works have lost in rawness, are more than made up in maturity. Take a look at My City (2015), Chan’s first foray into documentaries. Ostensibly a documentary about the writer Xi Xi (please seek out a translation of her brilliant essay ‘Shops’), the film is much more than that. It is also a portrait of a changing Hong Kong and Chan also confounded documentary purists by having characters from Xi Xi’s stories appear in the film.
Another astonishing recent work is The Midnight After (2014). In the beginning, it looks like a typical Hong Kong scenario–a busload of diverse passengers, all dealing with their own joys and sorrows. The bus enters a tunnel and when it exits at the other end, the passengers discover that they are, literally, the only people left in the city. The truth, as always, is sinister. I won’t spoil your enjoyment of the film by revealing any further.
Chan is also a very practical man. When a Singapore film student who is originally from Shanghai asked him how to find inspiration in the streets of Singapore, a much more staid place than the teeming multitudes of Hong Kong’s alleyways, Chan’s reply was classic. He advised the student to move back to China and make underground films, because there is a market for it.
