I’ll be able to drink from the river sleep on the roof and tell stories to village kids.

And I’ll capture everything on film.

This time around, I leave with a heavy heart.

I’ll never bow down to adversities, no matter how hard they hit me. I am a fighter.

I unexpectedly caught this gem when I went with Nick and Eugene to the cinema one lazy afternoon earlier spent on gorging food and wasting time. It’s been a while that I’ve got some thoughts about local films just because recent catch didn’t have much worthy of writing about.  I haven’t been keeping up with the local entertainment scene lately, save for producing some corporate videos and helping with shoots for my juniors’ FYP short films.

We were a little late 5:20pm when the sparse cinema hall at GV Marina Square finished screening the commercials and opening credits. The film, which opens with a girl in her 20s wanting to return some forgotten pictures from the decades old soon-to-be-shut photo studio to their rightful owners, revolves around the recapping of stories from  a park worker (played by Chew Chor Meng) who went through the Great World amusement park’s heydays. He narrates stories from the glorious times of the amusement park to the girl from when she showed him her collection of photos. There are 5 mini stories set in different eras which make up this piece, with the coming  together of many familiar local celebrities playing the different dialect-sprouting characters in the film.

For most of Singapore’s younger generation, this movie revives a piece of Singapore’s past that has evidently faded with the springing up of shopping malls and commercial spaces. Needless to say, what’s sits on the site of the amusement park is now the Great World City shopping mall.

Photos: Facebook, National Archives

With the film’s elaborate set design and mis-en-scene splashed with vibrant colours, the re-creation of the original amusement park once again shows Director Kelvin Tong’s ability to pull off high value productions with his international experience and reach. Together with cleverly chosen stories that tied in with few milestones of Singapore history (Separation of Singapore from Malaysia and the Japanese Occupation), this film fills the void of historical films Singapore seems to lack.

I guess local filmmakers just have not been able to leverage on the financial prowess of commercial entities to produce big scale productions that somehow assure profits and unless they credit big names familiar to local audiences. Other than the now defunct TCS local dramas back in the 1990s, there has not been any “historical” local films at all in the scene.

Can this be explained by the drop in quality and budget of MediaCorp productions lately that led to talented writers and directors like Kelvin Tong and Han Yew Kwang venturing into film production instead of television? After all there is a history of the intimate relationship between film and television back when the latter was invented, causing the decline in sales of  Hollywood films in the 1940s.

I finished the FYP,

Graduated,

Moved around quite a fair bit,

Continued to shoot,

Fell in love,

And almost found Kiarostami!

We live to question. If one day we stop questioning and accept the status quo, we’d be reduced to mere puppets being living in the increasingly uncontrollable reality dominated by the rich and powerful. You lose grip of yourself and become insane. But…what is insanity?

“I don’t know what it means to be mad,” whispered Veronika. “But I’m not. I’m just a failed suicide.”

“Anyone who lives in their own world is mad. Like schizophrenics, psychopaths, maniacs. I mean poeple who are different from others.”

“Like you?”

“On the other hand,” Zedka continued, pretending not to have heard the remark, “you have Einstein, saying that there was no time or space, just a combination of the two. Or Columbus, insisting that on the other side of the world lay not an abyss but a continent. Or Edmund Hillary, convinced that a man could reach the top of Everest. Or the Beatles, who created an entirely different sort of music and dressed like people from another time. Those people – and thousands of others – all lived in their own world.”

- Veronika Decides to Die, Paulo Coelho

For my friends out there in the working world, never stop questioning, like what we did in every tutorial. We debated with vigour and passion, getting into heated arguments and fist fights, for the sake of defending our stands and getting our points across.

But at work, it’s a taboo to question. It’s always easier to submit to authority because it’s no longer 10% participation points but the paycheck  to support lavish lifestyles at stake. I believe that’s how many people lose themselves and eventually choose to believe in materialism because it’s become pointless to take a stand.

“I choose to live this life because this is what I truly want. I live to be insane because I know I’m brought to this world for a far greater reason than to merely exist.”

For this little island that once lit up my life became a diminishing flame.

The little shop where uncle Botak sold us bread and newspaper gave way to a spanking new NTUC supermarket

It’s a sign of changing times maybe my heart has gone cold

I don’t know but perhaps I’m growing old.

The place I know that I once belong

I hope I still can sing the same old song.

Maybe…maybe.

There’s not one of us who hasn’t been touched by them in one way or another. From the Russians to the Mujahedin to the Taliban, war has stolen our fathers and brothers; the leftovers of war continue to take our children; and the results of war have left us poor as beggars.

So the foreigners can keep their walk of beautiful scenery and traditional goodness because all of us would swap it in a heartbeat for just one moment’s peace and it’s high time the sorrow that came to plant itself on our soil just packed up and went away to terrorize someone else.”

- Born Under a Million Shadows, Andrea Busfield

Literally the last image…from my camera.