Chris Chong, Karaoke, 2009

Two Southeast Asian new media artists + filmmakers’ debut feature films will be screened at this year’s Cannes’s Directors’ Fortnight.

Sabah-born Chris Chong’s elegiac KARAOKE will be the first Malaysian feature film in 14 years to be screened on the Directors’ Fortnight platform, while Singapore makes its fifth year of consecutive presence in the Cannes Film Festival with Ho Tzu-Nyen’s poignantly surreal feature, HERE.

KARAOKE tells the lyrical story of Betik’s homecoming to his village estate set in a Malaysian oil palm plantation. Working in his mother’s karaoke joint for the plantation workers at night while helping to shoot karaoke videos during the day, he unwittingly falls for Anisah. But life isn’t so innocent. Everybody wants something. Subtle manipulations driven by self interest and personal desires seep through yet the songs continue to be sung. Slowly Betik realises his home has changed and the oil palm trees have grown in endless symmetry. The film is a subtle meditation on Malaysia’s changing landscape and the emotional cost unmindful economic progress has exacted upon a country, as unsuspecting individuals sing along to the karaoke video which is a metaphor for our collective aspiration.

HERE was shot entirely in Singapore across 11 days in a former mental hospital. It tells the story of a middle-aged man who struggles to make sense of his reality following the sudden death of his wife. The protagonist of the film, played by lead actor John Low, is selected to undergo a mysterious treatment known as the ‘videocure’. While undergoing treatment, he learns a profound lesson about love and fate. Ho adds, “HERE is both a love story, and also a story about the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of ‘Amor Fati’ or
love of fate in which the test of an affirmative life is that of someone who is willing to live his life over and over again, without making a single change.”

KARAOKE is Chris’ first feature-length film. Prior to this, Sabah-born film director and media artist has received worldwide acclaim for his short film BLOCK B (2008), and the documentary KOLAM (2007). Produced by Chris’ own Tanjung Aru Pictures, the 75-minute Malay-language KARAOKE was shot on location in Selangor over 12 days in December 2008. But even before the film was shot, KARAOKE was invited to the Berlin Film Festival’s Script Clinic in 2007, and was selected to participate in the Hong Kong-Asian Film Financing Forum (HAF) in 2008.

HERE is a co-production by Canada’s gsmprjct media and M’GO Films and Singapore’s Akanga Film Asia, Oak3 Films and Tzulogical Films. Tzu Nyen is best known for his 2006 The Bohemian Rhapsody Project, a film where the spoken dialogue is constituted entirely by the lyrics of Queen’s 1975 hit, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, set in the former Supreme Court of Singapore as well as Utama – Every Name in History is I (2003), an installation of film and paintings about the forgotten pre-colonial founder of Singapore, which was first produced for The Substation and subsequently exhibited at the 26th Sao Paulo Biennale (2004), and the 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (2005).

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In competition are Malaysian born Taiwan based director Tsai Ming Liang’s new film FACE (Visages), about a young Chinese filmmaker who stages a musical based on the story of Salome in the Lourvre museum, and Filipino Brillante Mendoza’s KINATAY, based on the stories of murder victims whose body parts have been chopped off and mutilated.