South Korean thriller The Assassin(s) is set to open the 37th Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF), which will take place from October 21-November 1 – over a month earlier than its traditional slot.
Director Hur Jin-ho and cast members Shim Eun-kyung and Park Sung-hoon will attend the opening gala. The film received its world premiere at Toronto last week and was named second runner-up of the international TIFF People’s Choice award.
Receiving honours at this year’s festival will be Indian star Aamir Khan, who will accept the Screen Icon Award and will attend a special 25th anniversary screening of Oscar-nominated Lagaan: Once Upon A Time In India alongside director Ashutosh Gowariker.
Japanese auteur Hirokazu Koreeda will also be feted with the Cinema Honorary Award along with a special presentation of his recent Venice competitor Look Back.
More than 25 Singapore productions and co-productions that have received international recognition at major festivals will be celebrated on home ground, including local director Ang Geck Geck’s feature debut Ah Girl, which won the youth jury award at Rotterdam and best actress for nine-year-old Ong Xuan Jing at Hong Kong; and Thai filmmaker Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s 9 Temples To Heaven, which premiered at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and is co-produced by Singapore’s Lai Weijie of E&W Films.
Further titles are Indonesian director Kamila Andini’s Four Seasons In Java, which premiered at Toronto and is co-produced by Singapore’s Anthony Chen of Giraffe Pictures; and Thai director Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s The Burning Giants, which premiered at Venice and was edited by Singapore’s Daniel Hui. All four titles are running in SGIFF’s main Asian Feature Film Competition.
“Singapore’s film industry is enjoying its hard-earned recognition on the world stage,” said SGIFF programme director Thong Kay Wee. “Many of these filmmakers found their first mentorships through SGIFF, so sharing their stories and work on Singapore screens this year is, in that sense, a homecoming.”
The festival’s In Conversation With series will include South Korean actor Shim Eun-kyung, Hong Kong filmmaker Peter Chan and Hong Kong actor Anthony Wong, who will also participate in a post screening dialogue of his first acting role in 1985’s My Name Ain’t Suzie.
Further prominent filmmakers set to attend include Asian Feature Film Competition jury head Yim-Soon Rye, Cannes competitor Nagi Notes director Koji Fukada, Sleep No More cinematographer Akiko Ashizawa, The Unknown cinematographer Tom Harari and Cageman director Jacob Cheung.
This year’s programme aims to bring new ways for difference audiences to enjoy cinema. For the first time, a Junior Explorers section will be introduced with relaxed, sensory-friendly screenings for younger audiences. Gabriel Osorio Vargas’s stop-motion animation Brave Cat will open this section having previously won an audience award at Annecy, where it premiered in June.
The Undercurrent section will open with three live performances at Esplanade Annexe Studio that blend moving images with interdisciplinary mediums such as Taiwanese puppetry in Corporeal Forms: Four Stories, live video gaming in The Compression Zone, and analogue film techniques and music performance in Imagination + The Rest Is My Ghost.
SGIFF Pro, the festival’s industry and talent development programme, will be expanded, including Parallax, a new free public programme exploring filmmaking and immersive technology, and Pitching Forum for Singapore and international co-production.
SGIFF executive director Jeremy Chua said: “We have reconsidered how audiences encounter a festival with new presentation formats and points of entry, a ticketing platform that is markedly more intuitive, an industry programme expanded into a resource centre for artists, technicians and storytellers at every stage of practice, and a new free-to-attend section at the intersection of creativity and technology, attending to the forms storytelling will take next.”
After a short hiatus, the SGIFF Film Fund will return with a renewed focus. The Tan Ean Kiam Foundation will now also back the Southeast Asian Short Film Grant in addition to the Southeast Asian Documentary Grant, which will be under the banner of SEA-Shorts and SEA-Doc respectively.
Since 2018, SEA-Shorts has been a launchpad for Southeast Asia’s emerging filmmaking voices, with past recipients going on to premiere at Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week in Cannes. SEA-Doc will focus on post-production support, backing feature documentaries in late edit or finishing stages, with an emphasis on sociopolitical projects.
SGIFF is supported by Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA).
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