Posted on Feb 23, 2010 under Culture, Entertainment, Films, Travel, dining |
Singapore is a barrage of sensations, where sounds, colors, and smells are constantly coming at you, offering you new ways to turn your attention outward, and find new ways to chase your thoughts. It’s a splendid city to get lost in, if you have the time, and one of the wonderful things about vacations is that funny thing they do to time. You can enjoy all the sights that the guidebooks recommend, see the local shows, enjoy a Chinese restaurant, and find yourself distracted by the show of everyday life that’s going on in the streets.
There are plenty of entertainments in town, and all art forms, too. With theatre, performance art, experimental music, installation art, and more, there are always lots of things to choose from. There are also local filmmakers, too, and the indie scene is not necessarily at a level to compete with the big movie making cities, but with filmmakers like Eng Wee Pen, it is certainly alive.
She has two documentaries, Diminishing Memories 1 & 2, and they’ve both been earning her a lot of attention, and her reputation is growing as a young artist to watch. Both of these films are about her family from her perspective, the first one constructed of her own memories as a nine-year old, and the second from her point of view today as a 20-something. This is a very honest family portrait, framed in a way to make you constantly aware of the framing. This is a rather brilliant touch, so that while we’re watching her memories, we think about how we construct our own.
Posted on Jun 01, 2009 under Art, Culture, Films, Travel |
When traveling in Bombay, hotel accommodations are very high on the list of priorities. In the midst of one of the largest cities in the world, there needs to be at least one place of respite, somewhere that luxury and comfort can be counted on. Whether the trip is for relaxation, where the hotel will be the place most seen, or for adventure, where the hotel is a place to sleep, comfort is key to rejuvenation of the body, mind, and spirit. Mumbai is one of the most dazzling places on earth, where the vibrant urban scene is dotted by one memorable event after another. The locals are fascinating studies of humanity, and it’s really no wonder that this is also one of the film capitals of the world. There is always so much visual stimuli, it takes the hands of a very skilled artist to bring the energy into some kind of focus.
Rajat Nagpal and Devashish Makhija, Bombay artists, collaborated efforts to make a series of short films. Begun with the intention of making three works that were based on shifting points of view, they put their directing and writing talents together to make experimental video to go along with a visual arts show in Bombay. Almost as an afterthought, they made an extremely short work, barely over one minute long, about the death of a rooster, that has brought them an awful lot of attention.
Titled “Rahim Murge Pe Mat Ro,” the film has been listed on some prominent lists as one of the 10 favorite films of the year. It has also been shortlisted from 2500 hundred films in the Filmminute: International One-Minute Film Festival. Although the content is a bit disturbing on multiple levels, the pace and style are absolutely brilliantly funny. These artists achieve a kind of beautiful unity of art in a very short time, and push the limits of the film form. Their impressive qualifications and experience suggest that there is more to come from these artists, and hopefully at times they will be able to collaborate again, but the document they’ve left behind is a splendid work of brief cinema, and another notch in the artistic identity of Bombay.