There will be seven short films screened for Selection 3 of Singapore Shorts ‘23.
This screening will be followed by a Q&A session with the filmmakers.

The Rating for Selection 3 is NC16

 

Aunt Lotus & Her Dream Bicycle
Original title: 一輛腳車兩個輪
Year: 2022
Director: Kew Lin
Runtime: 16 min
Country: Singapore
Language: Mandarin, Teochew
Rating: G

Synopsis
Spurred by a film production crew who claims that she has no imagination, a blind grandma constructs an unusual cycling simulation with common household items. Kew Lin’s short film is a metacinematic reflection on dreams, reality and representation. An English audio description version of the film is available for the visually impaired.

Director’s Bio
Kew Lin is a Singaporean writer-director with a consuming fixation for the make-believe. His short film Of Pets & Dinner (2019) premiered at the 65th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and was featured in RECIPROCAL 2023, an AFA collaboration with the Eye Filmmuseum.

Altar
Year: 2022
Director: Vikneshwaran Silva
Runtime: 18 min
Country: Singapore
Language: Tamil, Malay, English
Rating: NC16

Synopsis
Living alone, an ageing widower spends his meagre income as a security guard on lottery tickets. From the unblinking point of view of his only household companion, Altar witnesses the strokes of luck and cruel twists of fate that befall him.

Director’s Bio
Vikneshwaran Silva is a freelance director and editor who makes award-winning independent short films. He honed his skills at the MET Film School in 2018 with a MA in Directing. His latest short film, a sci-fi thriller titled Deja View, is in post-production.

 

A Day, That Year
Original title: 某天，那年
Year: 2022
Director: Stanley Xu
Runtime: 9 min
Country: Taiwan, Singapore
Language: Mandarin
Rating: PG

Synopsis
Five-year-old Yang spends an afternoon with his mother on a shopping trip. But a seemingly harmless punishment becomes a pivotal childhood experience that will forever change him.

Director’s bio
Stanley Xu is a Singaporean filmmaker based in Taiwan. Drawing on everyday experiences and his memories when growing up, he captures the nuances of being human. His films have been screened at major festivals internationally, such as in Busan, Hawaii, and Singapore.

 

18
WORLD PREMIERE
Year: 2023
Director: Lee Jing Wei
Runtime: 2 min
Country: Singapore
Rating: PG

Synopsis
18 Paths. 18 Exposures. 18 Frames per second. A peek into the old Singapore through the doors of the new.

Director’s bio
Lee Jing Wei is a multi-disciplinary creative, filmmaker, and motion graphic artist. The most recent film that he lensed, Passing Phases (2022), was screened at various dance film festivals worldwide.

 

RING RING, MAMA
Year: 2022
Director: Grace Song
Runtime: 4 min
Country: Singapore
Rating: PG

Synopsis
A Singaporean Gorilla is evicted from his jungle home to make way for new Built-To-Order flats. Thrown into civilisation, he breaks into Mama’s house, where he meets a small beast and a weird ringing contraption. Shot on Super 8, Grace Song’s offbeat film offers a fresh take on the dilemmas of urbanisation.

Director’s Bio
Grace Song is a writer-director and multidisciplinary artist. Her latest short film, Hour of The Flower, which won ‘Most Promising Script’ in the Objectifs and MomoFilm Co. short film incubator, was shot on 16mm, and is currently in post-production.

 

a spider, fever and other disappearing islands
Year: 2022
Director: Natalie Khoo
Runtime: 21 min
Country: Singapore, Indonesia, USA, Philippines
Language: English, Teochew
Rating: PG

Synopsis
An experimental documentary connects the filmmaker’s grandmother’s migration from the Indonesian Riau Islands to Singapore with a spider spirit’s route, weaving together memories of colonial ghosts, sisterhood, and disappearance. Emerging through this melange of media forms is a re-imagined archipelagic and family history that reclaims the act of story-telling as simultaneously generative and fluid.

Director’s bio
Natalie Khoo is a filmmaker and programmer based in Singapore with a background in archaeology and anthropology. Her films often employ experimental documentary-fiction approaches, and have screened at Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, Queer East Film Fest, Sea Shorts, Singapore Short Cuts, among others.

 

where are you now
WORLD PREMIERE
Year: 2022
Director: Lim Hok Lye and Tai Binquan
Runtime: 19 min
Country: Singapore
Language: English, Mandarin
Rating: PG13

Synopsis
When Loo Lay Yen suffers a stroke, the lives of her husband and three boys are changed forever. Shot by her eldest son, Tai Binquan, the film features family albums alongside raw documentary footage. where are you now is both a loving tribute to Loo and a piercing inquiry into care, dignity and the ethics of representing end-of-life experiences.

Director’s bio
Tai Binquan graduated from Ngee Ann Polytechnic with a diploma in Film, Sound & Video. Having been exposed to working different roles in all aspects of film production, he made a documentary as his final year project.

 

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For the full Singapore Shorts ’23 programme, please click here.

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