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Showing posts with label Yeo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Yeo. Show all posts

12 December 2013

Floating Sun (幻日, 2013)



Floating Sun (幻日, 2013) is a bit of a departure for Tokyo-based Malaysian director Edmund Yeo into the horror genre.  This short film is his contribution to Hungry Ghost Festival: 3 Doors of Horrors (鬼節:三重門, 2013), a 45-minute horror omnibus film produced by prolific Malaysian filmmaker James Lee for his indie production company Doghouse 73 Pictures.  The film premiered on Youtube on the 17th of August.  The omnibus, which was designed to showcase young Malaysian directors, also includes Leroy Low’s I Miss You Two and Ng Ken Kin’s Horror Mission.  This review is of the 20 minute director’s cut of Floating Sun considered independently of the omnibus as a standalone short film.



The plot of Floating Sun comes from a short story by author and poet Kanai Mieko (金井美恵子, b. 1947).  According to Yeo’s blog Swifty, Writing, he happened upon Mieko’s collection of short stories The Word Book at the Aoyama Book Center in Roppongi.  Her story “The Moon” was the inspiration behind his beautiful short Last Fragments of Winter (2011), while Floating Sun is based on the story “The Boundary Line”, about the corpse of a woman who drowned.  

As with many Edmund Yeo films, Floating Sun blurs the lines between past and present, real and imagined.  A young novelist, Fiona Yang (Emily Lim), is writing a story based upon the unusual circumstances surrounding the death of her teenaged classmate Chen Xiao Hui (Candy Lee) many years ago. Chen Xiao Hui was found floating on her back in the river by a security officer (Azman Hassan), and the events continue to affect all those involved.  Since beginning to write the story, Fiona has been haunted by images of Chen Xiao Hui’s corpse floating in the river.  A series of strange events also begin to disturb her and her young daughter Teng (Regina Wong) in the apartment that they share.  The disquieting events seem to be connected not only to the haunting presence of the spirit of Chen Xiao Hui but also to possible guilt surrounding Fiona’s affair with married man Wai Loon (Steve Yap) – but this interpretation is my own as the circumstances are deliberately left vague.

 

It turns out that Fiona was the last person to see Chen Xiao Hui alive, a fact that she downplays as being unimportant because they were merely classmates not close friends.  A flashback reveals that Fiona recalls sitting with Chen Xiao Hui at the river and saying: “Do you know, if you look at the sun from underneath the water, it is as if the sun is floating.  It’s a lovely sight, but sad at the same time.”  These comments suggest that Chen Xiao Hui’s death may have been an accident. 

The location for the river scenes really makes the film.  Chen Xiao Hui lies in the water as if being embraced by the root of a giant tree.  This tree was truly a great find for the film for its numerous roots are not only poetically beautiful, but add symbolic weight to the film: the roots behind the events in this vignette are many, but Edmund Yeo leaves us only a few tantalizing clues and leaves it to our imaginations to fill in the blanks.   It’s an atmospheric and suspenseful tale that leaves us wanting to know more about these characters.    

You can watch Floating Sun as part of the Hungry Ghost Festival: 3 Doors of Horrors (鬼節:三重門, 2013) on Youtube.

Written, directed, and edited by:
Edmund Yeo

Executive producer: 
James Lee

Director of photography:
Lesly Leon Lee

Music:
Wong Woan Foon

Cast: 
Emily Lim as Fiona Yang
Candy Lee as Chen Xiao Hui
Daphne Lee as Fiona (teenager)
Steve Yap as Wai Loon
Candy Ice as Wai Loon’s wife
Azman Hassan as the security guard
Regina Wong as Teng

 Catherine Munroe Hotes 2013
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06 November 2013

Springtime Nostalgia (残香/Zankō, 2013)



“Ikebana is born from the encounter of nature and humans; 
it is the coming together of nature and human life.  .  .  
a clear example of perfect harmony between man and nature.  .  .” 
- Sōfū Teshigahara (1900-79)

Ikebana is seldom used as a motif in movies.  Watching Edmund Yeo’s latest short film Springtime Nostalgia (残香/Zankō, 2013), it occurred to me that the art of filmmaking and the art of ikebana actually have many things in common.  Both capture the ephemerality of the natural world in a structured way and invite us to observe and reflect upon these aspects of the world that we live in.

Edmund Yeo’s short films give the impression that the filmmaker judiciously plans each frame and edit of his films just as carefully as the ikebana artist selects flowers and branches and meticulously trims and arranges them.  Just as ikebana shuns the ribbons and bows of European floral design, there are no unnecessary adornments in Springtime Nostalgia.  The emphasis is on the actors and the settings. The lack of music focusses our attention on the subtlety of the soundtrack with natural sounds such as the sound of the sea and local birds adding nuance to the poetic visuals.  My birder husband remarked upon the sound of the Japanese bush warbler whose “hō-hoke-kyo” call is one of the iconic sounds of spring.  



The central narrative concerns a woman (Kiki Sugino) who loses her sense of smell after her lover (Akira Orihara) disappears.  The man had loved ikebana and as part of her search for him she joins an ikebana class.  Here the woman’s story crosses paths with the lives of an elegant ikebana teacher (Quoko Kudo) and her daughter (Eriko Ono) who may have a connection with the missing man. 

Words are inadequate to describe Springtime Nostalgia because so much of the story concerns ideas and feelings evoked by the visual metaphors of the film:  the flower arrangements placed in scenes, the petals on the ground, actress and producer Kiki Sugino’s expressive face as she contemplates the flowers that she cannot smell, and so on.  Past and present overlap one another in this mysterious tale of love and loss, time and memory.  Even the central protagonist herself is uncertain which parts of her story are real and which are a dream, like a “lovely, lingering scent” (the zankō of the official Japanese title) stirring distant memories from the recesses of one’s mind.

Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZvL18V1ZV8

Afterthought



The most famous connection between ikebana and film can be found in the films of Hiroshi Teshigahara, whose father Sōfū Teshigahara established the famous Sōgetsu School of Ikebana whose daughter Akane Teshigahara heads the school today.   Teshigahara profiled his father and the Sōgetsu School in his 1956 documentary Ikebana (蒼風とオブジェ いけばな / Sōfū to Objet Ikebana).  Edmund Yeo talks about his rediscovery of the films of Teshigahara during the making of Springtime Nostalgia  on his website.  Would love to hear from readers about other films that feature ikebana.  Let me know in the comments.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2013

Edmund Yeo Filmography

Chicken Rice Mystery (2008)
Fleeting Images (2008)
Love Suicides (2009)
kingyo (2009)
The White Flower (2010)
Afternoon River, Evening Sky (2010)
NOW (2010)
Inhalation (2010)
Exhalation (2010)
Last Fragments of Winter (2011)
Springtime Nostalgia (2013)



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01 October 2012

Last Fragments of Winter (冬の断片, 2011)




Memory can be such a fleeting thing, often taking the form of fragments of images, sounds, tastes, and smells.  Tokyo-based filmmaker Edmund Yeo’s latest short film Last Fragments of Winter (冬の断片/Fuyu no danpen, 2011) is an assemblage of just such snatches of memory.  It is beautifully shot and poetically arranged in a non-linear fashion.

As the film opens, it is not quite clear whose story is being told and what the relationship is between the wintery traditional village of Shinagawa-go in Japan and the urban and rural landscapes of Malaysia.  Gradually, scene by scene, the characters and story begin to reveal themselves.  Before long it becomes apparent that these fragments of memory belong not just to one person but to three members of the same family: a mother, a father, and their young son.  In spite of their youth, all three have had to deal with a world of troubles and sorrows.

The father (Berg Lee) attends the Buddhist funeral of a former lover and speaks to her ghost, the young son (Foo Kang Chen) is sent on an errand in place of his absent sister, and the mother (Tan Ley Teng) struggles with a mysterious illness that is making her progressively weaker.  The mother has a passion for photography which dates back to her youth.  As a young woman (played by Arisa Koike in the flashback sequences) visiting Japan, she quietly walks around the village of Shinagawa-go as though she is loathe to disturb its tranquility. The only sounds are the chatter of the hiyodori (brown-eared bulbuls), the cry of a distant jungle crow, the crunch of the snow beneath her feet and the click of the shutter on her Mamiya camera.  This scene is paralleled with a similarly idyllic outing she takes later in life with her young son to photograph a rice patty field in her native Malaysia.  The woman’s desire to record the world around her evokes the theme of the ephemerality of life on earth. 

In collaboration with cinematographers Kong Pahurak and Tan Teckzee, Edmund Yeo has put together a hauntingly beautiful film.  From the greens and blues of the family’s Malaysian apartment to the white and black of rural Japan in winter, each scene has been carefully crafted to create just the right tone.  There is an other-worldliness to the scenes of Arisa Koike in the snow  that suggest that this may not just be the youthful memories of the mother but an eternal place where weary souls may go to rest.

The story was inspired by a short story called “The Moon” by celebrated writer Mieko Kanai.  Kanai seems an ideal choice for adaptation as her stories are highly visual in nature.  Yeo has managed to capture the dream-like quality of a Kanai story while adding unique elements from his own personal experiences.  The film won Yeo an award at the recent Sapporo Short Film Fest (learn more) and has also played at festivals in Dubai and Nara.  Keep an eye out on Yeo’s official website for information about future screenings.

©2012 cmmhotes

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This is the latest in a series of reviews of the short films of the award-winning Malaysian filmmaker Edmund Yeo (b. Singapore, 1984).  A graduate of Murdoch University in Australia, Yeo has been based in Tokyo since 2008 when he moved there to pursue a Master’s degree at Waseda.  His films have received wide acclaim at international festivals including Cannes, Pusan, and Rotterdam.  Click on the film titles below to learn about his other works.


Edmund Yeo Filmography (homepage)

Chicken Rice Mystery (2008)
Fleeting Images (2008)
Love Suicides (2009)
kingyo (2009)
The White Flower (2010)
Afternoon River, Evening Sky (2010)
NOW (2010)
Inhalation (2010)
Exhalation (2010)

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16 August 2012

kingyo (2009)




The young female protagonist of kingyo (2009) is dressed in a maid’s costume and wanders the streets of Akihaba offering maid tours of the district for ¥10,000.  Business is going slowly except for an odd request by a creeper, but then the woman (Luchino Fujisaki aka Rukino Fujisaki) encounters her former university professor (Takao Kawaguchi) who pays for a tour in order to enjoy an hour of her company.

Sensei looks tired and haggard and we soon learn that the pair were once lovers.  When the woman broke it off, she gave sensei the parting gift of a pair of goldfish which he took home and gave to his wife (Amane Kudo).  Affairs, even when both participants are single, more often than not create an emotional mess when they go sour but when a spouse is cheating it adds the pain of deceit and disloyalty into the mix.   Visual cues suggest that sensei loved both his wife and his lover and is torn apart by the fact that in caring for the beautiful goldfish his now recently deceased wife was unwittingly nourishing his memories of his former lover.  The man’s dilemma is eloquently expressed not only in the face of the talented performance artist Takao Kawaguchi playing the sensei, but also in director Edmund Yeo’s innovative use of the split screen technique. 



Split screen is a technique that goes back a long way in cinema history, but in my opinion it has not yet reached its dramatic potential.  It has been used for comic effect – as in the Rock Hudson/Doris Day romantic comedy Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959) and these days is often used to liven up music videos or concert footage.  A number of directors have used it successfully for dramatic effect such as Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) and Bruce McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments (2007).  Yeo’s use of the split screen is similar to that used by Roger Avary in The Rules of Attraction (2002): showing two actions that are happening simultaneously.    It works both to build tension (such as the parallel actions of the sensei and the student in Akihabara) and to add atmosphere to scenes (two shots of same scene: the wind blowing the curtains gently as the wife observes the goldfish in their bowl. It also adds suggestive story information as in the brief split screen of the wife and the lover.

The most difficult section to shoot and edit must have been the dialogue between sensei and the student during his “tour” of Akihabara.  Yeo used a two camera set-up and it all looks very minimalistic and graceful, but having worked on film shoots in Toronto, I imagine it must have been technically very challenging to get the lighting and camera positioning right.

Like Love Suicides (2009), kingyo is another adaptation of a short story by Yasunari Kawabata.  The original story “Canary” (1924) featured canaries instead of goldfish.  Yeo informed me that he thought goldfish were more Japanese than canaries, and they certainly look stunning in close-ups.  The choice of fish reminded me of Kuniko Mukoda’s short story “Mr. Carp” which involves a former mistress giving her married lover a koi fish.  If I remember correctly, the starring fish evokes feelings of guilt on the part of the man.   

It  is a beautifully shot and edited film.  Yeo has a delicate touch when it comes to creating atmosphere in his films.  I was particularly taken with the actors’ performances – especially Kawaguchi, who has an extraordinarily expressive face.  kingyo made the short list for best short film at Venice in 2009 and won awards at the Larissa Mediterranean Festival of New Filmmakers and the Eibunren Awards 2009.

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This is the third in a series of reviews of the short films of the award-winning Malaysian filmmaker Edmund Yeo (b. Singapore, 1984).  A graduate of Murdoch University in Australia, Yeo has been based in Tokyo since 2008 when he moved there to pursue a Master’s degree at Waseda.  His films have received wide acclaim at international festivals including Cannes, Pusan, and Rotterdam.


Edmund Yeo Filmography (homepage)

Chicken Rice Mystery (2008)
Fleeting Images (2008)
Love Suicides (2009)
kingyo (2009)
The White Flower (2010)
Afternoon River, Evening Sky (2010)
NOW (2010)
Inhalation (2010)
Exhalation (2010)



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01 August 2012

Love Suicides (信, 2009)



When love goes sour it can bring out the worst in people.  Sounds and gestures which were once held dear transform into irritations for the heart gone cold.  Edmund Yeo’s Love Suicides (2009) tells the tale of a woman (Kimmy Kiew) who has been abandoned by her husband.  She and her daughter (Arika Lee) live a quiet, simple existence near a rice paddy field in rural Malaysia. 

The daughter takes pleasure in the few things she has to play with:  she diligently practices on her  woodwind recorder or plays with a red balloon that hangs limply on the string.  Brief letters marked airmail begin arriving from the husband which mysteriously suggest that he can hear every sound the girl and her mother make:

“Dear wife, don’t let the child play the flute.  It’s too noisy.  My heart aches.”

“Dear wife, don’t send the child to school wearing shoes. It’s too noisy.  My heart aches.”

“Dear wife, don’t let the child eat from the porcelain bowl.  It’s too noisy.  My heart aches.”

Although the woman and daughter appear to be completely alone, the woman follows her husband’s instructions to the letter.  The daughter says nothing, but her words and actions suggest a growing sense of anger and resentment.  In the excerpt below, the mother is force feeding the daughter because the little girl is not allowed to eat on her own from the porcelain bowl:


There are many ways to read this short tale – the film itself being an interpretation of the even darker short story of the same name by Yasunari Kawabata.  From my perspective, it is a tale of abuse.  The quietness of the film – the excerpt above features the word of dialogue, there is no music and only a few incidental sounds (the recorder, shoes on gravel, the waves on the shore) – intensifies the tension that builds in the film.  It is a tension that leaves unspoken the at worst physically violent and at best verbally abusive relationship that must have existed for this mother to unquestioningly follow out her husband’s cold written instructions.

Cinematographer Lesly Leon Lee (vimeo) has done an inspired job shooting the film in cool colours and dark shadows.  Each sequence is beautifully framed.  The profoundest shot for me was the one of the mother lying on a tangled web of a fishing net.  It is an eloquent metaphor for the situation she finds herself in.

The original short story is one of the many gems contained in the Kawabata The Palm-of-the-Hand Stories collection translated by Lane Dunlop and J. Martin Holman. Love Suicides premiered at the Festival Paris Cinéma 2009 and Yeo won Best Director for the film at the China Mobile Film Festival 2009 and the Doi Saket International Film Festival 2010.  The film was produced by Greenlight Pictures.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

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This is the second in a series of reviews of the short films of the award-winning Malaysian filmmaker Edmund Yeo (b. Singapore, 1984).  A graduate of Murdoch University in Australia, Yeo has been based in Tokyo since 2008 when he moved there to pursue a Master’s degree at Waseda.  His films have received wide acclaim at international festivals including Cannes, Pusan, and Rotterdam.

Edmund Yeo's official website

Edmund Yeo Filmography

Chicken Rice Mystery (2008)
Fleeting Images (2008)
Love Suicides (2009)
kingyo (2009)
The White Flower (2010)
Afternoon River, Evening Sky (2010)
NOW (2010)
Inhalation (2010)
Exhalation (2010)

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Fleeting Images (2008)


“Time, which changes people,
does not alter the image we have retained of them.”
- Marcel Proust

Cinema grew out of the human desire to capture the fleeting images of our lives in some kind of permanent record.  Image, time and memory were favourite themes of the recently departed filmmaker Chris Marker (1921-2012) and this short film by Edmund Yeo is an homage to Marker’s meditative, poetic documentary Sans Soleil (1983).

Like Sans Soleil, Fleeting Images is narrated by a woman who conveys her interpretation of letters she has received from a close male friend.  The letters are a poetic contemplation of the passage of time and the tenuous strands of fate that connect people of varying circumstances, times, and places together.

Instead of drawing on T.S. Eliot or Racine as Marker did in Sans Soleil, Yeo turns to Proust for inspiration.  Memory is the central theme of Proust’s great work À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–1927). Sights, sounds, and smells trigger involuntary memories from the past for the narrator and the novel was groundbreaking in its exploration of how we perceive time. 



Although Fleeting Images is only 10 minutes long, Yeo manages to capture the essence of his Proustian theme using montages of contemporary images and motifs.  The letters are sent to the female narrator (played by Nicole Tan but narrated by Tsai Yi-Ling) by email, and the life experiences of blind Indian children and elderly Tibetan refugees are contrasted with imagery of the modern streets of Tokyo.  These fleeting images haunt the letter writer as he seeks to understand the world as it is seen by others.  There is a sweet little montage of animation by Julian Kok as the letter writer wonders if the world of the blind children’s imagination could possibly be more colourful than we imagine.

The disconnect that city dwellers have with the natural world is represented in the film with great poignancy when the letter writer despairs of being completely oblivious to the setting of the sun while caught in the swelling sea of humanity flowing through the streets of Shibuya.  The setting sun becomes a motif for the passage of time and it recalled for me the Buddhist notion that impermanence and change are the undeniable truths of our existence.  For the cynical viewer, Edmund Yeo’s Fleeting Images may dip a little bit too far into sentimentality, but for such an early, experimental work by a young filmmaker I think this may be forgiven.   

Fleeting Images won the Grand Prix at the CAN CON Movie Festival in 2009 from an international jury which included film critic Chris Fujiwara and director Naomi Kawase.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2012

This is the first in a series of reviews of the short films of the award-winning Malaysian filmmaker Edmund Yeo (b. Singapore, 1984).  A graduate of Murdoch University in Australia, Yeo has been based in Tokyo since 2008 when he moved there to pursue a Master’s degree at Waseda.  His films have received wide acclaim at international festivals including Cannes, Pusan, and Rotterdam.

To learn more about Edmund Yeo visit his official website.  


Edmund Yeo Filmography

Chicken Rice Mystery (2008)
Fleeting Images (2008)
Love Suicides (2009)
kingyo (2009)
The White Flower (2010)
Afternoon River, Evening Sky (2010)
NOW (2010)
Inhalation (2010)
Exhalation (2010)

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03 March 2009

Film of the Sea (海の映画, 2007)


Takashi Ishida (石田尚志, b.1972) is an abstract animation and installation artist in the vein of Norman McLaren, Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, and Mary Ellen Bute. Not only is Ishida on the cutting edge of the contemporary Japanese art film and installation scene, but he has also made waves internationally with his work. He has most recently been spending a lot of time in Canada where he has done screenings of his works in Toronto at Trinity Square Video and Cinématheque Ontario. His work is currently included in a Projection Series at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal which runs until March 29th.

Aurora included Ishida’s 2007 Umi no Eiga (海の映画/Film of the Sea, mini-DV, 12 min.) in its recent DVD collection of the best works from their 2008 festival. Other artists featured on the DVD include Sophie Michael (UK), Vanessa O’Neill (USA), Chris Kennedy (USA/Canada), Samantha Rebello (UK), Lin de Mol (Netherlands), Charlotte Pryce (USA), Sara MacLean (Canada), Yeon Jeong Kim (South Korea), Philippe Gerlach (Austria), and Stefan Kushima (Austria).

Umi no Eiga was created over a period of four months at the Yokohama Museum of Art. The initially plain white room of the art gallery plays a significant role in the making of meaning in the film. A lone film projector has been placed in the room and it projects a seascape image centrally on the wall in the same position at which a painting would be hung. Then, however, Ishida blurs the boundaries between projected film and traditional art gallery space by using stop motion to create the effect of blue paint flowing out of the projected image of the sea, continuing down the wall and flooding out onto the floor of the gallery.

The film then follows a pattern of creating and erasing oppositions: negative versus positive space, inside versus outside, light versus dark, blue (or black) versus white, movement versus stasis, sound versus silence, consonance versus dissonance, and so on. The animation of the room full of swirling waves of paint, and then its erasure again mimics the perpetual flowing of the tide in and out on the beach. The result is truly mesmerizing.

The metaphor of the sea is complex in the multitude of ways in which it can be interpreted. The sea is a symbol of constancy, with the waves rolling in and back out again, and yet the sea is also ever-changing as the waves never form themselves in the same pattern twice. Ishida’s sea can be seen as a metaphor for Ishida’s stop motion art itself which can never be reproduced in exactly the same fashion. The process of making the film also resulted in multiple ways of ‘seeing’ or experiencing the art process, including an installation version called Wall of the Sea (海の壁 -生成する庭) with three synchronized screens. On his website, Ishida describes the installation as follows:

In this installation, three different images which were shot in the same room are projected by three projectors. The one image is various retakes of the images of the sea which projected by a film projector put in a room, and another two images are the images of the drawing animations expanded to the room. Originally, the image which was made by projecting from the projector in the rectangle is "the right Film", but, in this work, images spread from the rectangle to the whole of the room by a large quantity of paint. Occasionally the screen fell down and was flooded and sank in a room. This work is an experiment to expand the image from the structure of the film. Then through those variations of many results, this work will try to let audiences regard "what is the image".

Ishida seems particularly concerned with the fluidity shape, surfaces, frames, and boundaries in his oeuvre. Shapes and surfaces are there to be manipulated, while frames and boundaries are meant to be crossed. In particular, Ishida blurs the boundaries between genres with his work using elements from film, painting, performance, and sculpture. Keep an eye on Ishida's news updates here to see if his work might soon be featuring at a gallery, cinématheque, or festival near you.

Thinking and Drawing / Animation



© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2009
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