Changing Perspectives

Film fanatics rejoice — the annual Perspectives Film Festival is back with seven films that changed the face of cinema. Reviews Editor Jared Alex Tan sits down with several members of this year’s team to find out more about the festival’s theme of Transition.

PHOTO: Greek Film Centre

Lectures and textbooks are great tools for improving your knowledge, but some things are best learnt through pure experience. When it comes to understanding the complexities of a film festival, there is no better way to learn than by organising one yourself.

The Perspectives Film Festival is organised annually by undergraduates from NTU as part of the Film Festival Practicum module offered by the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information. Currently in its eighth year, the Perspectives 2015 team comprises of 20 students from the faculties of WKWSCI, Art, Design and Media (ADM), Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) and Nanyang Business School (NBS).

Like many other film festivals, the theme of Perspectives changes every year, and while previous iterations have explored a wide range of topics that include sexuality (2012) and displacement (2014), each one is grounded by the underlying concept of “breakthroughs in cinema”.

As the name suggests, every featured film is required to possess a breakthrough of some sort, be it in terms of cinematography or social importance. The Canadian drama Mommy, for example, was shot in a square framed 1:1 aspect ratio, while Turtles Can Fly was the first film to be made in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

For festival directors Tan Yang Er and Anna Lai — both students from WKWSCI — one of their goals was to make the Perspectives Film Festival accessible to a wide range of audiences, from arthouse enthusiasts to more casual moviegoers. The pair also hopes that all viewers will appreciate the films not just as entertainment, but as an art form.

“Prior to joining Perspectives, I wasn’t a movie fanatic, and preferred to watch dramas on TV,” Lai said. “Through this festival I learnt a lot — like how everything a director does is for a specific purpose — and I guess that is what we want to showcase to the audience.”

STRIVING FOR DIVERSITY
The theme for this year’s Perspectives Film Festival is “Transition”, which Tan describes as “an external change that causes an internal difference”. The concept is an amalgamation of several ideas, derived from three of the programming team’s original pitches of “travel”, “murder and madness”, and “dreams”.

Bringing the theme to life, however, was not without its fair share of obstacles. According to Head programmer Chong Jun Feng, the main challenge was to ensure that the selection of films wholly encapsulated the abstract concept of transition.

“There are so many types of transition — from coming of age, to joining the army, and so on,” said the final-year WKWSCI student. “What we tried to do from the very start was to ensure that there was one film from every category.”

Chong and his fellow programmers continued pushing for that notion of variety, striving to feature one film from every continent, and one from each decade from 1950. The list of potential films was eventually reduced to twenty, and it took one month of careful deliberation before the team managed to decide on the seven films that would make the Perspectives 2015 lineup.

LOOKING FORWARD
Months of tireless planning culminate in this weekend when the film festival takes place at the National Museum of Singapore.

Based on the sheer amount of work that the team has put in, it is clear that the Perspectives Film Festival is less of a module and more of a love letter to cinema.

“I took Perspectives because I wanted experience with events management, and I would say that passion for film just came along naturally,” said Lai.

As their time as festival directors draws to a close, Tan and Lai are optimistic that the Perspectives Film Festival will continue to grow in the coming years, largely due to a dedicated fan base.

“There is a great following of people who support the Perspective Film Festival every year, and what really excites them each time is the release of each year’s theme,” Tan said. “Every part of the festival — from the events to the films — is all curated strongly for this theme, so every year is a new thematic experience.”

The Perspectives Film Festival 2015: Breakthroughs in cinema will take place from Thursday, 15 October to Sunday, 18th October at the National Museum of Singapore (93 Stamford Road, Singapore 178897)

For information of the films and showtimes, visit the official Perspectives website at www.perspectivesfilmfestival.com, and purchase tickets at www.sistic.com.sg/events/film2015.