BY ARTERI

An exciting programme is lined up for Palestine Film Week that is being jointly presented by the Malaysian Social Research Institute, Amnesty International Malaysia, Help University College and Kelab Seni Filem Negara.

By June Yap

After watching visual artist Brian Gothong Tan’s first foray into feature film-making, Invisible Children (2008), it took a while for me to pin down exactly what I felt about the work – a ordinary sensation, but remarkable nonetheless.

by Zedeck Siew

Obituary: Yasmin Ahmad, 1958 – 2009

The dreamer, her films I didn’t like, and why we will miss her.

oleh Yin Shao Loong

Kebelakangan ini, kita telah menyaksikan pergadohan hangat di laman ini. Tapi untuk mereka yang kurang minat bergadoh ‘seni’, bolehlah anda rilek dengan menonton filem baru Nam Ron dan Brenda Danker – Gadoh. Filem ini tidak dapat ditonton di pawagam awam, cuma di teater HELP sahaja, kerana topiknya menyentuh pergadohan perkauman di sekolah kebangsaan Malaysia.

by Fashionaddict

I watched “Revolutionary Road” recently, and found myself distracted by the clothes, which were beautiful (along with the cinematography actually). I can never decide if this is a good thing. Is it too much of a distraction from the film itself, or does it enhance the whole movie-going experience?

by Zahirah Suhaimi

The recent controversy sparked by Chinese film, City of Life and Death by director Lu Chuan, has compelled me to mull over the challenges with establishing a universally accepted perception and use of the freedom of expression. In allowing alternative views and creative opinions, can we ever find a way to manage the precarious balance between censorship and sensitivity?

By Nazim Esa

Bernard Chauly’s cross-cultural approach to his artistic discourse spans across theater, film, television and now, the visual arts; in this podcast interview, he talks about love, his work in the recent Light Show 2009 exhibition, and cooking!

Now with nifty photographic visuals!

by Yin Shao Loong

Amir Muhammad’s Malaysian Gods (MG) offers an amalgam of two strands of Malaysian life. The first being a history of the genesis of Malaysian reformasi relayed in English text. The second is interviews in Tamil or Tamil creole with a variety of Tamil speakers. Like an amalgam these two strands have different properties but are nonetheless juxtaposed in the hopes of exerting a useful effect on each other. Street politics is matched with life from the streets.

by ARTERI

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.

by Simon Soon

No one speaks of the quotidian in a more fluently surreal language than Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I always like the way he describes his films. In this new short film, specially commissioned for AnimateProjects as part of his new installation ‘Primitive’, he speaks of it as a portrait of home and projects a vision of a place that is both destructive and tender, painting a tableaux that vividly sticks to one’s imagination.

by ARTERI

One of ARTERI’s commitment is to trawl the cyberspace in search of video works from Southeast Asia that are uploaded onto youtube or other video channels and bring them to our readers’ attention.

The inaugural entry for this series highlights excerpts from Ming Wong’s Four Malay Stories, commissioned in 2005 for Labilabu, a two-man exhibition with Khairuddin Hori as part of Pesta Raya Malay Cultural Festival at the Esplanade, Singapore.