S’pore film festival to focus on Asian excellence for 30th edition

LOS ANGELES: For its 30th edition the Singapore International Film Festival has avoided programming novelty and instead focused on assembling excellence – mostly indie titles – from Asia and further afield.

The festival, which previously announced local filmmaker Anthony Chen’s second feature Wet

Season as its opening night gala presentation, announced the balance of its programming yesterday.

Other galas are set to include Downton Abbey, and Nina Wu.

Hirokazu Koreeda’s The Truth was named as the closing film. The festival runs Nov 21 to Dec 1. The nine-film competition section includes: Dwelling in The Fuchun

Mountains; Indian animation, Bombay Rose; Indonesia’s The Science of Fictions, and Verdict, all of which have received favourable reception elsewhere on the festival circuit.

Prizes for the competition will be decided by a jury that includes India’’s Anurag Kashyap, Indonesia’s Nia Dinata, Singapore’s Amir

Muhammad, and Hong Kong’s Pang Ho-cheung.

One sidebar section includes Asia-Pacific festival favourites including Balloon, A Girl Missing, Coming Home Again, Breathless Animals, No.7 Cherry Lane, The Wild Goose Lake, Saturday Fiction, Babyteeth and The Lighthouse.

From outside the region, presentations include Monos, Les Miserables, Portrait of a Lady on Fire and The Two Popes.

A small midnight genre section includes Deerskin, and Miike Takashi’s First Love.

A similarly small classics section includes Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder, and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai.