Friday, April 15th, 2005
Director Caveh Zahedi talks with braintrustdv.com about his latest feature I Am A Sex Addict, which screens next week at the Tribeca Film Festival:
“The film is a portrait of a sex addict, and the women are seen through his eyes.
“The film never pretends that what we are seeing is the truth about these women. If anything, it implies just the opposite. What’s clear in the film is that he is unable to see them clearly and projects his own needs onto them. We, as viewers, can see that his view of them is entirely delusional. In this sense, I feel that the film is absolutely anti-objectification — only rather than showing strong women or fully developed female characters, the film shows the consequences of objectification. This is also a very Hegelian idea — that you have to go through the stages of history to get to the end of history.”
.… Read the rest
Friday, April 15th, 2005
An interesting article by Erika Franklin, “The Jaywalkers: Filmmaking Singaporean Style,” in Firecracker — a recently-launched online magazine specializing in East Asian cinema — profiles the new wave of independent filmmakers coming out of Singapore. Among these is Royston Tan, whose film 15 played this past weekend at the Mix Festival in NY prior to a theatrical run, via Picture This!, at Anthology Film Archives.
As Ziad Semaan writes in his review of Royston’s film in the same issue of Firecracker 3: “The notoriously controversial 15 has finally broken out of its native Singapore and into the eyes of the rest of the world. Royston Tan’s nihilistic attitude towards the traditions of both his country and the filmmaking process within have attracted more attention to the film than it probably deserves — although how can one turn down an invitation to view a film considered ‘a threat to national security’ by the Singaporean censorship board?
“Tan’s exploration of the alienated and disturbing lives of five fifteen year-olds on the glossy streets of Singapore’s metropolis provides a chilling insight into the degradation of overlooked fringes in a wealthy Westernized society. Abandoned by disintegrating value-systems, such as their schools and families, the boys drift through an aimless routine of skipping school, dealing drugs, indulging in tattoos and piercings, not to mention other ills of consumer-focused societies…
“Tan’s use of real life street kids who reinterpret his vision from their eerily similar lives certainly drives home the point, but more provocative than the violence, bad language and drug use (of which the films of Larry Clark have portrayed more extremely) is Tan’s heavily stylized and unconventional style. His fast-paced slicing of the film is muddled with MTV chapter titles and scenarios depicted in true video game aesthetics. But, simultaneously, Tan presents the friendship and comraderie of these gang members in some patient sequences with stunning, if sometimes inconsistent, cinematography. Tan uses the cut with skill and precision — sometimes to present the apathy and emptiness of these boys’ lives, while other times extending their suffering, editing repeated shots into extended sequences … Read the rest
