Author Brandon Wee

There are certain film festivals whose films and business politics always inspire great discussion. There are others where the warmth of community beats all else. For some hospitality and competency are their h...

Few would have missed the chorus of lament sung mostly by the American and British press about this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Now a standard response from the corporate and grassroots press who file regular ...

19-29 April 2007 At Hot Docs this year, two titles about Japanese involvement in World War II made it as official selections. Nanking (2007), co-directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, chronicles the...

7-16 September 2006 “The Midnight Madness category was originally devised as a spot for films that didn’t really ‘fit in’ with a traditional festival agenda… back in, say, 1988, when genre films didn’t n...

April 28–May 7, 2006 This is how it started. It was a most trivial event that was dramatised out of proportion. It happened many years ago, one early spring. You had not been to a festival in a while. Ne...

April 22–May 1, 2005 The festival’s publicity posters are modest but striking, and volunteer a definition of “documentary”. Like Mark Rothko tableaus, thin blocks of text hang over dominating fields of...

January 13–24, 2005 At the time of this writing, two domestic events of historical significance have recently come to pass in Thailand. The latest, in early February, was the re-election of Thai Prime Mi...

Ten years in the making, Lav Diaz's epic ten-hour Evolution of a Filipino Family has finally left the editing room and is more than worth the wait. In this interview, he discusses the immense undertaking of making the film, as well as Filipino society and cinema past and present.

September 9–18, 2004 In the title of Jia Zhangke's latest film, The World (2004), the noun refers figuratively in one instance to its setting in “World Park”, a Beijing tourist trap where replicas of in...

Every year since 1999, a festival in a northern Italian town has played host to a week's worth of the most popular films from East Asia. Although this focus is a recent preoccupation, the festival's shell i...

I'm thinking of quitting doing film festival reports because I remain sceptical that this format can produce anything novel. I get bored with, tired from and sick of the chains of conventions that will sure...

Sri Lankan filmmaker, Dharmasena Pathiraja, whose works are humanist social commentaries, enjoyed a retrospective at this year's Singapore International Film Festival.