The joke about Singapore being a great city (meaning that many seemingly minor infractions are punishable by fines) and the analogy about Singapore’s now repealed chewing gum laws were made by filmmaker, writer and film editor Daniel.・It will be unforgettable for Hui.
He says his new film, “Small Hours of the Night,” which will premiere Saturday at the Rotterdam International Film Festival’s Harbor section, is about small events, small gestures, and small emotions. Little things that shape history.
And in the film’s opening scene, with only a telephone, an ashtray, a tape recorder, and a rough corner of a wall, Huy’s treatment of the subject may be minimalist, but it’s also quietly brutal.
“Director Hui’s film is a rare piece of Singaporean politics, tackling head-on the city-state’s iron-fisted policies against its opponents. The protagonists, a collection of various real-life defendants from Singapore’s history, are at the mercy of the law. , and will represent all those whose fate has been decided by the court,” the Rotterdam programmer said in a memo.
In a dark room sometime in the 1960s, a woman (Yanshuan Vicky Yang) is trapped and interrogated by a man (Qasban Irfan). As the long night passes, identities and time periods begin to blur. A ghost from the future haunts their conversation.
Hui plays with time, but the factual heart of A Little Hour in the Night is a 1983 trial known as the Tan Chai Wah Tombstone Incident. In the early years of Singapore’s independence (from the British Empire in 1963 and from Malaysia in 1965), Tan was an armed activist, possibly a communist, who rejected the separation of the two countries. He was working as a bus driver when authorities captured him in 1976. He fled Singapore but was caught with a loaded gun in Malaysia and hanged in 1983.
Tan’s brother’s precedent-setting trial, which took place later that year, was related to a militant and revolutionary poem that Tan tried to inscribe on his tombstone. The brothers were jailed for advocating acts endangering Singapore’s security.
“For Singapore, as in many other places in the world, the criminal court is a place where public customs and taboos are defined. The court sets an example of what is permissible and what is prohibited. We will publicize this through the judgment and disseminate the judgment through the media. And the general public is expected to follow suit,” Hui said.
“It is precisely for this reason that the Tan Chai Wah tombstone trial depicted in the film intrigued me. Not because of it – in fact, it’s been largely forgotten – but because it highlights the practices that have made Singapore what it is today: harsh punishments for petty crimes, the suppression of dissent voices, and the fact that no one , the absurdity of censorship that spares even the dead.”
Not content with merely critiquing an embarrassing, formative moment in Singapore’s uncompromising judicial history, Small Hours becomes increasingly slippery over time and identity. Hui suggests this is part of a defense mechanism.
“There are only two characters on screen in this film, but there are five characters who speak through Vicky, four of whom are based on real people from the 1983 Tan Chai Wah Tombstone Trial. . None of their names are mentioned, not only for safety reasons, but also because it could be anyone,” Hui says.
“Vicki herself is a fictional character, representing the paranoia and fear that activists had to deal with then and now. Reality and changes in identity, like what happens in dreams, are for me It’s important because the boundaries between us are constantly changing and forever renegotiated,” he continues.
A graduate of California Institute of the Arts’ film program, Hui is particularly well-suited to mind-blowing training. In addition to his three feature films as a director of short films and “Eclipses” in 2013, “Snakeskin” in 2014, and “Demons” (2018 Busan Kim Ji-seok Award Competition, 2019 Berlin Forum). , directed by Hui, is a sought-after film. Editor. His recent editing work includes Locarno Golden Leopard Award-winning Yeo Shu Hwa’s A Land Imagined and Nicole Midori-Woodford’s acclaimed feature debut Last Shadow at First Light. “And so on.
Hui is one of the founding members of Singapore’s independent film collective 13 Little Pictures, along with producer Tan Bee Thiam. In Rotterdam, Hui will have the dual task of promoting his next film, Other People’s Dreams, at Cinemart.
Watch the trailer for “A Little Hour in the Night” here.
