Dear readers,

We hope you’ve been able to rest and recover after the whirlwind of the festival.

In our round-up issue, we look back at the themes and subjects across the articles published in The Daily. As the year draws to a close, we find it opportune to revisit the questions and concerns which surfaced during the festival, and which will remain pertinent as we prepare for the year ahead.

In a special piece, film programmer Renee Ng reflects on her experience at the FFIGS Lounge, how it became a home for spontaneous interactions and expanded the possibilities of what a film festival could be.

With that, the inaugural edition of The Daily comes to an end. We are giving away one last complete set of print copies, including an exclusive print issue with our editorial round-up and Renee’s personal essay. Any Ko-fi contribution of $10 or more gives you a chance to win this limited collection — head to our Instagram to enter the giveaway:

CORRESPONDENCE will return in 2026, with more details to come.

Happy holidays to you and your loved ones!

Best,
Sasha and Tracey

The 10 days when I practically lived at the FFIGS Lounge proved to me that there was indeed a longing for such a space. Many who came were young students, critics and cinephiles whose faces or Letterboxd handles I vaguely knew and I’m glad I can finally put a name to. I was amused when the same few showed up with the express aim of clinching the latest CORRESPONDENCE issue, and when I heard of a cinephile making the pilgrimage just to find someone to rant to about a film he’d seen. At our showcases, Transgressions: Experimental Student Films from First Shot(s) X-Change and our Rejected Films Potluck, we enjoyed the spontaneity of moving images being shared and experienced together. No curation or expectation of merit; every film a pure surprise to behold. Some days were sleepy, others chaotic. While there were points I noted for improvement (more nooks and seating islands would have inclined visitors to stay), there was a sense that something was coming to life. Maybe it was the space, the furniture, our film merch trinket shelf, or the hand-drawn felt wasps crawling all over. When people chatted and napped, they gathered their own chairs and fluffed their own pillows. We were at home. It was a feeling I wanted to hold onto and remember forever.

At one of our guest lunches with friends at the FFIGS Lounge, I sat next to Ben Slater as he regaled us with histories of SIFF and SGIFF, a winding odyssey of miracles, strides, precedents, friendships, teams coming together, disbanding, and metamorphosing. All this he recounted to a circle of young-uns, myself included. I was struck by the same bewilderment I had when I read 25: Histories and Memories of the Singapore International Film Festival, to step back and see the festival (or Singapore’s film scene) plagued by the same joys and struggles, wins and losses. As if we were and will continually be subjected to a mythical constellation of pre-ordained events, doomed to an institutional amnesia that separates veterans from incoming festival staff and cinephiles. Huddled in 136 Goethe Basement Lab, it felt like an important moment of knowledge being passed down and held in our unknowing hands. I wondered if 20 years down the road, we might also regale the next generation with tales of how we pulled off the greatest prank (and party) of all time — this reverse film festival and cinephile playground, the illegitimate brainchild we christened FFIGS.

At the same time, I saw again how the 10 days we shared were marked by ephemerality. The fizzy spontaneity of randos walking in and picking up conversations; divine mages ShuaiGeCentral, Umbra, and MdmDotty who each spawned out of nowhere, generously offering their talents for free. Just as CORRESPONDENCE (and the WASSPS ON THE WALL gossip column) germinated rapidly, FFIGS was born and laid to rest (for now) within the 10 days that it festered. We made new friends and shared honest perspectives. We scrawled confessions, and film reviews ranging from raunchy to incisive and heart-wrenching into a handmade guest book I stitched together from whatever scrap film ephemera I could find in my paper tin. After our parody FFIGS x COCKEYE Awkward Awards, a cross between a neighbourhood beauty pageant and a birthday show, we held a table read of the Exquisite Corpse Screenplay with a modest but bubbly audience of 20. Written anonymously over 10 days by whoever wished to continue the story, the script organically evolved into a supernatural action-packed ensemble piece (with possible influences from the recent We Can Save The World!!!) starring SGIFF’s celebrity guests, local film personas, a personified form of The Projector, and more. It was the campiest, dirtiest, most unfiltered, laugh-out-loud script ever. As in any cult film, underneath the funny voices and laughter, was the space it held for our very real shared anxieties — the closure of The Projector, the endless tussle with bureaucracy, the constipated state of our self-censored art scene. I wondered how all this could be remembered in any ‘proper’ way. If we perished tomorrow, the only written record of us would be a string of shitposts, one F Zine article, and ominous mentions in the few A3 copies of CORRESPONDENCE in existence. As it should be.

A fig wasp’s lifespan is notoriously short. Two weeks into our social media launch, someone DM-ed us a nature documentary reel on the mutualistic relationship between figs and wasps, the crucial metaphor behind our title and logo. I watched extreme close-ups of the oddly sensual and slimy way wasps burrow and pollinate a fig’s butthole, dying dramatically after laying its eggs. As the eggs hatch, the bastard children of the dead wasp immediately engage in incest, before battling their way out into the world in search of a new fig to pollinate. There is a funny, but strangely fitting, double entendre of codependent alien-like impregnation at work here. Like the fig and wasp, our relationship with SGIFF would always be transient, codependent, playful, flirtatious, and symbiotic. Mama wasp may be dead, but pregnant baby wasps infest the skies.

FFIGS will be back.

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Renee Ng is a film programmer and video editor. She enjoys all manner of collage work and is interested in the socio-cultural relationships that films and cinephilia share with the world.

A correspondence comes into being when a writer sends their piece out into the world. Writing demands a measure of vulnerability; the writer shares their thoughts and at times, lays bare their heart, opening themselves to judgment and critique. For that, we thank our writers.

As we put together the various issues, we noticed thematic parallels and recurring preoccupations across pieces — throughlines revealing the shared concerns of critics, programmers, and film workers today.

The question of visibility and representation is intrinsically at the heart of any discussion on screen culture. Meditating on Sascha Milinski’s Sound of Falling (2025), Daniel Hui pens an ode to the spirits of the dead who linger around us, while Dora Leu writes about Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf (2025), and how it brings us to an awareness of the imperceptible life deposited in every pixel. Playing on our senses, cinema draws our attention to the edge of the visible and opens up new realms in our consciousness. In her piece, Tracey Toh writes about how Julián Galay’s expanded cinema induces dreams and conducts us into a heightened state of susceptibility. Likewise, Dora’s interview with Lin Htet Aung, director of A Metamorphosis (2025), delves into the film’s capture of an uncanny feeling, that of waking up in front of the tv, mind awash with images.

With its propensity to conjure illusions, cinema lends itself to the exploration of dreams — the subject of Nurain Amin’s Proposals for the Interpretation of a Dream (2025). In the short film, a young girl, played by Nurain, tries to decode a recurrent nightmare in which she finds herself in an empty old house. When speaking to angels yields no answers, she dials a live hotline that connects her to a tarot medium, eventually leading her to a girl she finds oddly familiar. Made in the wake of her grandmother’s passing, Nurain’s film evokes the sense of helplessness that accompanies grief, the desperate search for familiarity and meaning in the aftermath of loss. Though it remains in the SINGAPORE PANORAMA section, the film was refused classification by the IMDA and could not be screened. Programmer Vess Chua writes about the conspicuous absence which arises when certain films are withheld from public viewing, compounding the crisis of visibility that short films already suffer from.

As with any programme, the silences and omissions in films are as important as what we see. Aditi Shivaramakrishnan and Saksham Mehrotra argue for the value of films that centre a specific culture, or a historical chapter, while attending to the ways these works might elide other realities.

Many writers were sensitive to these contradictions, which inhere in art, as in life. Several used films as a focal point, through which they examined the tension of being an individual while bound to a community — a tension that surfaces in fraught familial relations, as discussed by Wenxin Gao, Phyllis Chan, Morris Yang, Savunthara Seng, and Alyssandra Maxine, in her conversation with directors Grace Song and Gabriela Serrano.

Other writers approach films as a site of cultural critique, analysing how people are fashioned, or failed, by society. Amadeus Yeo puzzles over Hong Sang-soo’s latest addition to his tapestry of misogynistic men. Critic Amarsanaa Battulga and educator Teng Qian Xi observe how identities, friendships, and affection are tangled up with the extractive forces of capitalism. To survive, people resort to painful compromises, a point made by Ryan Lim, who coins the term festivality to describe the expectation that cultural workers not only show up, but match the buoyant, celebratory mood of a festival.

Even as the excitement around the festival subsides, filmmakers and moviegoers continue to confront long-term problems regarding the decline in cinema attendance and the closure of independent cinemas. Several articles in The Daily address the state of cinema in Singapore: Vincent Quek of Anticipate Pictures poses the question of how local audiences will get to watch local films beyond SGIFF, while producers Lee Yi Jia and Martin Loh share their strategies for encouraging people to go to the theatres. In their interview with Sasha Han, UNDERCURRENT programmers Sam I-shan and Gabriel Goh also open up about the challenges of cultivating an audience for experimental moving image works.

Amid a precarious climate for cinema, writing clarifies what is at stake. Reflecting on Polen Ly’s Becoming Human (2025), Saksham Mehrotra recalls a childhood spent in the communal cinemas of India, reminding us of what we stand to lose when only commercial cineplexes remain. LANDMARK programmer Alexander Lee expounds on the need to preserve our filmic heritage through restoration, while Just Another Filmmaker takes aim at the pursuit of superficial images over substantive narratives. These pieces issue a rousing call for us to fight for the spaces we cherish; to back the work we believe matters.

As cinema attempts to survive within an attention economy, a film festival becomes an even more critical locus for the industry. Several contributors reflect on the history and developments of SGIFF, as a dedicated time and space to gather as a community, and to platform promising young filmmakers. Ben Slater composes a personal microhistory that charts the evolution of SIFF to SGIFF. As the regional festival circuit continues to evolve, Jason Tan Liwag interrogates the adherence to premiere requirements, given the distinctive economy and philosophy of short-form cinema. Meanwhile, other pieces consider how a festival guides its audience and nurtures its most ardent followers. Independent programmer Viknesh Kobinathan compares the different sections in the festival to a map that bewilders rather than orientates audiences, and Benjamin Yap asks whether the Cinephile Pass truly supports aspiring critics and content creators. And what of the passionate volunteers who keep the festival running? Two dedications, by Daryl Cheong and Grace Song, shine a light on their unseen but indispensable labour, returning us to the theme of visibility, and its converse, invisibility.

Writing is an art of noticing, paying attention to what is overlooked, or putting what feels unsayable into words. In articulating an intuition, each piece of writing is an opening for a conversation. This is integral to a culture of healthy discourse, as the writer elucidates the reasoning behind their conviction and allows readers to decide for themselves. Not everyone will share the sentiments expressed, and we welcome those with a different perspective to write in and share their thoughts on the subject. Our editorial policy is to publish diverse and dissenting voices in a lively exchange with one another.

Together, these essays and conversations form an archive of ideas and experiences — lines of inquiry that are still unfurling. In writing, a film lives on, each article becoming an indelible record of the film’s existence, even beyond a screening, or despite the lack of one. Long after a theatrical run, or a festival, we hope these pieces will invite you to dwell on your encounter with cinema.

Dear readers,

On the last day of the festival, we turn our focus to the place of films within an evolving social discourse. Last night, the editors caught Lin Htet Aung’s A Metamorphosis (2025), featured in today’s issue and Gabriela Serrano’s Elenita Elena Elaine (2025), discussed in yesterday’s issue. Both are short films that explore how the psyche of a population is shaped by popular media and bleak political realities.

Our final issue tackles the politics of representation and the portrayal of history in cinema. Saksham Mehrotra writes about the controversy around Deepa Mehta’s Funny Boy (2020), and proposes ways of critically engaging with a film that misrepresents the Sri Lankan Tamil community. Dora Leu interviews Lin Htet Aung about creating work that captures the sensations of life in Myanmar under the current political regime, and bookmarking history for the future. These pieces reinforce the value of film as an important locus in ongoing conversations about representation, as well as documentation for posterity.

Our correspondence will continue with a round-up of The Daily by the editors, and a reflection by our supporters at FFIGS. The pieces will be released on 13 Dec, the same day the festival hosts its encore screenings. 📮

A Metamorphosis has a strong visual concept with dense images and references. Could you walk us through the visual codes in your film?

Lin Htet: I wanted to make a film in colour because my previous shorts had been black and white. People usually begin with objects or stories, but I started with thinking about what colours do, and more importantly, what colours I want to use.

In Myanmar, my family is working-class and while we don’t know the intellectual aspect of politics, we experience its effects firsthand as whatever happens in politics directly affects the working class. To address this, I thought about using the colours of our national flag, a combination of red, green, yellow, and white in the middle. The current flag was made by the military government, and each colour has a meaning, but they don’t really match our reality. I wanted to recreate that combination in a way that I think reflects my country’s reality.

Curtains, columns, and empty stages lend a televisual quality to your film, as if you were filming TV studios during off-air time. Were you interested in these television-like settings in relation to class?

LH: Growing up, television was the only thing we could entertain ourselves with and detach from brutal reality. Yet, television would also be used by the government. They would manipulate us with soap operas and dictators who had their own news segments. A romantic film could immediately be followed by a dictator’s speech. It was uncanny. We were used to it, but when I think about it now, it’s almost like The Ring.

There were also only two channels: one controlled by the military and the other by the government. I wanted to make something on TV that wasn’t programmed by either entity, as if we were seeing the censored bits of old shows that could not be shown on television. More than the film being about television, I wanted to recreate the sensation of the uncanny.

While we see studio backstages, we don’t see people in your film. Instead, we see more abstract images of a glass. Was there a story you were interested in conveying?

LH: The basic story of this film is about a glass cup turning into a monster. But I don’t want to make films to tell stories. The story is just… something-ness. I think when we try to tell the story of a film, it’s like betraying the film. Whenever I feel like I’m reaching some kind of story, I turn around and go another way. I wanted to make a film about the feeling of reality, memories, and the past.

What would you say you’re interested in doing?

LH: Engaging with the audience. Not teaching them how to see, but making things to exercise their eyes in different ways.

We do not see people in this film but we do hear one voice. We believe it’s human, but from what I understand, it’s not.

LH: It’s the voice of a former Burmese dictator, which I’ve regenerated with an AI software. Everyone in Myanmar who hears this voice will recognise him. It’s a kind of haunting. At the same time, he is singing a kind of lullaby, which has this controlling effect on you. In this case, by reanimating him with AI, you could ask: is he controlling us or is he being controlled? There’s still a sense that he’s brainwashing our minds with the lullaby. It’s interesting to me that film is close to poetry. Sometimes a sentence or word will be very clear — or not.

When people think of Myanmar, they remember a video of a fitness instructor unwittingly filming herself while a military coup takes place behind her. How do you position your filmmaking in relation to those kinds of images?

LH: After the military coup, we made a lot of documentaries about the situation in our country. The image you mentioned is iconic, and was featured in many films from Myanmar. For me though, I am fascinated by political elements, but not interested in using the suffering of others in my films. That’s sometimes needed to talk about certain subjects, but that’s something others already do.

I also don’t want to make films to teach political lessons. I want to make a film that stands on its own and is watched by Burmese people. I hope when they see this film that they experience and recognise something familiar, yet also reflect on their reality. That’s what I want to achieve: a political film that can be enjoyed by normal people.

Can A Metamorphosis be shown in Myanmar?

LH: Not for now, because of the dictator’s voice. But I’m not so concerned about showing it as soon as possible because I’m trying to make things that can be watched for years to come.

I make films with the intention that they will resonate when they are shown. Because I don’t have the power to stop politically repressive regimes, I always think about where I stand in relation to future generations. The only things I can leave behind are traces of my film and feelings for others to find and look deeper into to reveal the past. This is what I’m trying to create now. If my film is actively trying to teach them something, they will learn only from my film, and not look at other things. I don’t want to make a version of propaganda. I just want to leave something behind that people can encounter and be intrigued by.

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Dora Leu is a Romanian film critic, programmer, and filmmaker based in Dublin, Ireland. She spends her life in between video cassettes, punk bands, and Leslie Cheung.

First, there was casting. Funny Boy is the story of a Sri Lankan Tamil family set against the onset of the civil war in 1983, during which the majority Sinhalese perpetrated an ethnic cleansing of the minority Tamils. Yet, all the actors that play the Tamil family in the film are non-Tamils. Second, there was Deepa Mehta’s relationship with Sri Lanka. Her films Water (2005) and Midnight’s Children (2011), after being the subject of protests in India, were shot in Sri Lanka. Since then she has maintained close ties to the country — especially to the military and the former president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, both responsible for human rights violations against the Tamil people during the civil war.

All this begs the question — who is this film for? For a non-Sri Lankan Tamil audience, Funny Boy is an insightful story that exposes them to the barely discussed topic of the Sri Lankan civil war. For a Sri Lankan Tamil, it is the artistic product of an outsider claiming to represent them in a way they never agreed to.

It troubled me that I had only discovered these criticisms after watching the film. I, an Indian non-Tamil man, had been fooled by Deepa Mehta, an Indian non-Tamil filmmaker, into thinking that this was an authentic representation of Sri Lankan Tamils. Unable to find a way forward, I sought perspective from a friend who had lived through the discourse in Sri Lanka at the time the film was released. She suggested that if the film’s biggest failure was misrepresentation, then there is a need to work with the film and its filmmakers. To make it better rather than to shut it down for being imperfect.

I considered if filmmaking could be a conversation as opposed to a unilaterally directed work of art that must speak for itself. What would it mean to work with Funny Boy? Now that the story has been told, what do we do with the aftermath?

I imagine, to work with Funny Boy is to demand that Deepa Mehta produce more conscientious works through a close collaboration with the people that the film is about. However, the Canadian Tamil Congress had met with Mehta to discuss these very issues after the trailer was screened; and Mehta’s retort was simply, “People just want to be offended these days.”

The problem lies in the fact that, although Deepa Mehta refuses to engage with her audience, Funny Boy remains significant because it is one of the few widely accessible films about Sri Lankan Tamil experiences. Removing it from circulation would erase the value it offers. Engaging with Funny Boy critically, through classrooms, film clubs, and curated discussions, could reframe its impact. By pairing the film with contextual materials, including scholarship and testimonies from Sri Lankan voices, and screening it alongside works by Sri Lankan filmmakers, we can acknowledge its shortcomings while using it as a tool for conversation and representation.

Perhaps my and every viewer’s responsibility lies in simply demanding better. That does not require us to be generous nor sympathetic to the art and the artists’ politics, but that does give us the freedom to acknowledge the existence of a work, interact with it, and reimagine it.

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Through his work as a filmmaker and writer, Saksham Mehrotra tries to understand the line that threads between the human desire to develop infinitely and the inherent yearning to preserve nature.

Dear readers,

Our 11th issue surveys states of mental and physical exhaustion as young girls struggle through growing pains, and the world extracts its pound of flesh in a pitiless exchange for a salary. The articles in this issue attend to the depleted and weary body, considering how bodies can retreat into self-preservation and arrive at a means of persistence.

In our first feature, writer and Managing Editor of Southeast Asian film publication MARG1N, Alyssandra Maxine speaks to directors Gabriela Serrano and Grace Song on matrilineal relations in their respective films, Elenita Elena Elaine (2025) and Hour of the Flower (2025), and the inroads they are making into regional, feminist cinema. Next, researcher and translator Ryan Lim finds parallels between his own professional circumstances and the choices faced by Fren, the protagonist of Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s Human Resource (2025).

Issue 11 will be available at Oldham Theatre and the FFIGS Lounge, Goethe-Intitut. Issue 10 will also be available at the FFIGS Lounge today. 📮

It is hard to miss the fatigue. It is also hard to find clarity — much less the language to explain fatigue — when you’re staring right down its barrel. Fren is often silent, or talked over by (male) authority figures. But it’s not certain if she wants to say anything either. Besides being either a mother or a labouring subject, what other identity can she assume? In a society where self-improvement is more urgent than world collapse, Fren intuits that there isn’t much point in speaking.

Indeed, Human Resource opens with a still image of an ultrasound scan of Fren’s unborn child. The camera lingers for two minutes. Ultrasounds reveal something beyond perception’s limits; this suspended shot may assume Fren’s gaze but the object exceeds what she sees. In the discomforting stillness, there emerges a slow but devastating split between fixed ways of life and an uncertain feeling about how one should live. It’s as if a lump is forming in her throat, and it cannot be sublimated into coherent expression. Human Resource, anchored by similar inarticulations, off-kilter gazes and inward curls, seems less interested in holding up a mirror to the conditions of work or life, than in grasping for alternative ways to process this painful doubt about the future. What if this doubt were something to tend to productively, rather than pack away or tame?

I can offer no new epiphanies, just an admission that the lump in the throat is mine too. My encounter with this film is embedded in a festival ecosystem which habitually markets its exceptionalism or announces its inclusivity. I faintly recognize Human Resource’s crushing social economy (vertical TikTok slop of employees dancing as if they were family) in this space I call festivality. It refers less to a festival’s duration or atmosphere, than to the compulsion to exhaust oneself for the urgent currency of a cause. The cultural industry requires its workers to be available in every way for everything. Festivality goes even further; it carries an implicit demand to show up with care, devotion, and gratitude — as if this energy was infinite rather than something that depletes.

Cynicism or indifference are not alternatives either. Fren’s resigned expression suggests: there is no other choice; there is work to do and to carry through. Festivality tends to reproduce itself in absurd promises that work could be play, and play could become work. Amidst our slow exhaustion, having an exceptionally festive time is a poor substitute for freedom. Could there be anything else? Against festivality, my mind wanders towards practices of introspection or ambivalent interactions. With Human Resource, I sense that means of persistence: stillness, rest, the quiet determination to stay.

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Ryan Lim (ryan.limdw@outlook.com) is a researcher, translator, and an occasional film worker.

Hour of the Flower follows a child straying from her mother and embarking on a surreal journey. Her inner turmoil is reflected in the film’s colour palette, reminiscent of a Kandinsky painting. The neurodivergent protagonist absorbs subliminal colonial messages from a British nature documentary, cavorts with watermelon heads in the woods, contemplates an immaculate conception before a mirror, then briefly locks eyes with a stoic grandmother played by Song’s mother.

Meanwhile, in a soft neon world where people have ceased dreaming, the non-linear Elenita Elena Elaine centres on a daughter’s analog reckoning with her mother’s past. An ex-popstar, the mother now provides technical support for callers’ dream machines. They feel universes apart from one another as they get ready in front of the bathroom mirror each listless day. “[The film] touches upon cyberfeminism, our relationship to technology, and its effects on the psyche that trickle into the family unit, which I see happening in my own family or in the Filipino context,” Serrano shares.

Serrano’s mentors on Elenita Elena Elaine were mothers themselves. One of them, Anocha Suwichakornpong, also worked with Song over the pandemic on a shelved HBO series. Serrano says this reinforced the film’s themes of motherhood and child-rearing and helped whittle the story, which also serves as a proof of concept for an upcoming feature. “If the feature is a year in these three women’s lives,” she likes to say, “then the short is one night in their lives.”

Both films circle a familiar question that ferments inside daughters. How does an adolescent girl emerging into womanhood love a parent whose body has “been jaded and worn out by life,” as Serrano puts it? “Do children feel how their mothers feel?” asks Song. And is it possible for numb mothers to recall what they once felt at their daughters’ ages? How may they love one another in parallax?

Hour of the Flower grapples with one’s first menstrual period. “I was trying to bring forth this idea into the film and honour our bodies, that transition, and that space when blood comes out of us for the first time,” says Song. The filmmaker views the title not only as a reference to menarche, but also “the hour where women become directors.” “Making short films isn’t easy,” she reveals. “In film school, it was all about trying to either be popular or know a lot of films. My career started in COVID, when I was filming myself in Bat Soup. But I was thinking about the hundred years of filmmaking and how you only have so few women directors while the list of men are crazy endless. Where we are right now is a nice space, because I think women are more celebrated as filmmakers somehow. So I do feel like it’s the hour of women.”

Conversely, in Serrano’s perspective, a girl’s transition into adulthood is a vulnerable period, when they are at risk of exploitation. That was the case for the 80s and 90s Filipina pop idols, whose vicissitudes she researched and incorporated into the character of the mother. “My producer knew some pop stars who fell off. A lot of them got pregnant or married. A couple got into drugs, struggled with addiction, and had to leave the industry,” explains Serrano. “As soon as their biological circumstances took over their lives, the people whom they trusted to develop their career tossed them aside.” The mother, played by Agot Isidro, reverts to a blank stare as she awakes from a dream machine session, yanked away from the pink-tinged nostalgia of her past life singing ballads onstage.

The creation of Elenita Elena Elaine also enabled the growth of another filmmaker besides Serrano: her younger sister, Marianne. Her background as a hip-hop dancer and affinity with kinetics invigorated the older Serrano. “She was heavily involved in the creative process, to the point where she was practically directing on set. Being an actor and a writer, she was directing herself,” she reminisces with a chuckle. This mind melding, to the point where they could finish one another’s sentences, convinced Serrano to bring Marianne on as a co-director for their next project, Surface Tension (2025), which recently premiered in the Philippines.

Meanwhile, Song works with 16mm film stock, a dream she has longed to do since experimenting with Super-8. “I highly recommend doing it at least once because it changes the way you discipline yourself,” says Song. “When we shoot, you can hear the camera breathing.” The discipline required for the medium, she continues, matches the film’s concerns with grainy retrospection and pain far better than a clean digital image could.

When asked to advise women attempting to expand their own worldmaking through cinema, Serrano urges caution. If a film is a child, be “very, very picky” about whom you entrust it to. “This is a life you’re bringing into the world. You want to surround it with as much padding and support as possible.”

“Grow or die,” says Song. “Follow your own star. Knowing yourself and what you like and dislike is very important instead of being influenced.”

Together, Song and Serrano bring their idiosyncratic sensibilities to bear on the gloaming of women becoming, signalling a reinvigorated march forward for regional feminist cinema.

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Alyssandra Maxine writes about insubordinate subjects: improvisations, sprawling reparative readings, and Southeast Asian cinema.

Dear readers,

As we enter the second weekend of back-to-back screenings and approach the end of the festival, we wanted to highlight the labour of volunteers. Issue 10 is dedicated to honouring the tireless work of people in ubiquitous Film Warrior t-shirts stationed across all cinema venues.

In the first piece, filmmaker Grace Song writes a creative piece, based on an open call for past and present volunteers to emerge from their NPC status and embrace their main character energy. Next, multi-hyphenate film boy boy Daryl Cheong shares portraits of the volunteers whom he has befriended over years of attending the festival.

Issue 10 is now available at Oldham Theatre, and will be available later today at the FFIGS Lounge, Goethe-Institut. 📮

Molly Leong

Ask any former SGIFF staff about Molly, and myriad feelings and opinions will be triggered. No matter the reaction, one thing is clear: no one has shaped our cinema-going experience more than Molly. Molly’s proposals can be controversial, but she draws inspiration from best practices at other festivals, which have transformed SGIFF. Supporting the Rush Queue system, Molly has allowed more cinephiles into cinemas. By restricting entry of latecomers, Molly has defended the sanctity of the theatre experience. Headstrong and bold in her initiatives, Molly has reconfigured our experience of cinema.

Eli Stewart

For many of us who grew up with SGIFF, Eli has been a common sight, consistently volunteering for the past seven editions of the festival. In some ways, SGIFF has seen Eli through secondary school, junior college, national service, and now university. Many audience members have been greeted by Eli’s cheerful smile and comforting presence before screenings. How much that sunny presence has buoyed our moods as we entered the theatre!

Han Yiheng

Over the past two years, Yiheng has helped out with front-of-house, ticketing and ushering at the festival. But what many audience members would not see is how Yiheng takes the time between screenings to pull out his textbooks, complete his homework, and revise. Around the same time Yiheng had been volunteering, he was completing his GCE ‘A’ Levels. Yiheng’s passion for cinema saw him balancing his love for an event in its honour with his academic duty. He has since published a piece examining the changes our film industry sorely needs.

Christopher Koh

The National Museum of Singapore is one of the most challenging venues to manage at SGIFF. With its state-of-the-art visual and sound system, it has been the site of many popular and sold-out screenings. Christopher has often been in charge of the duties at this venue. At the 2023 edition of the festival, Christopher would often only have 15 minutes to coax guests out of the theatre, clean up the venue, test the next screening, then usher in the next crowd. Yet, through it all, Christopher maintains his calm composure and cheery disposition. If you’ve ever enjoyed a screening at the Museum, you have Christopher to thank.

Eri Chiang

Before Eri became part of the programming team in 2024 and contributed papers to film conferences, she started as a volunteer in the 2023 edition to acclimatise back into Singapore’s film landscape following her studies abroad I remember her dedication at the 2023 festival, when she was so overwhelmed by her ushering work at the National Museum that she had opted to skip lunch until I brought food over. Like other Film Warriors, Eri’s commitment to her work as a volunteer never wavers, even when it comes at great personal cost.

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Daryl Cheong makes, programmes, writes about, and organises community around cinema.

Volunteers are involuntarily thrown into this deep end of the spectrum. Yet volunteerism is sacrificial, communal, and transformative. In an article by The Straits Times about a study on volunteerism, the top two reasons volunteers continue giving their time and effort are “the difference they’re making and their belief in what the organisation stands for”. The study challenges organisations to “pay attention to volunteers’ life stages” by enabling their creative agency and providing opportunities to advocate and spur change. Studies show that long-term volunteering improves mental wellbeing and builds meaningful social connections through supportive community networks. What volunteers tell themselves about their work and how organisations actually see them are two fundamentally different things. Who are we to each other in these systems?

I sought to better understand these ever-present, ever-silent, ever-gallant warriors who keep our film festivals running. Through CORRESPONDENCE, I transmitted an online survey out into the Singaporean cosmos and found signs of *human* life (wow). Besides my enquiries into their reasons for volunteering, or why one would choose to come back to volunteer, there were also questions like “if you were a film, which film would you be?” And “what are your dreams in life?”. Unlike NPCs, who are void of creation, all humans have the ability to tell stories, and storytelling requires memory, contemplation, and imagination. A pseudonym, a “Main Player Username” was requested at the end of the survey. I was tickled, amused, and heartened by the responses, all of which were bravely human. I present the testimonies of ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ, h0ngk0ngweeb95, bran4gia, Burgundy and p3ace&l0ve.

ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ identifies as A24. ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ wants to be someone who “can appeal to both normies and indie kids alike” — ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ’s words, not mine.

ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ is easy going, and enjoys the free screenings while meeting cool people. ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ has chosen not to volunteer since achieving financial independence. They are now able to pay for screenings at the festival. ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ is currently writing a short film, and is interested in urban studies.

< ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ is turning out to be a pretty cool person themselves, let’s hope they don’t lose their cool on set. Keep ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ!!! >

h0ngk0ngweeb95 is John Woo’s Hard Boiled (1992). A cinephile with an intense love for 80s Hong Kong action movies. Besides the grandeur of the festival (and the free screenings) h0ngk0ngweeb95 enjoys meeting fellow cinephiles. <Finally, a pal to stare at pretty lights with.> Sadly, h0ngk0ngweeb95 chose not to volunteer again as they felt underappreciated and hurt that their efforts and sacrifices were not recognised and cherished.

< h0ngk0ngweeb95 let’s ga yau 加油 together and !karate-chop! Our sorrows away! We sayang you okay!! >

bran4gia would be Yeo Siew Hua’s Stranger Eyes (2024). They are seductive and elusive shape-shifters. A-listers don’t do it for them, they love to be seduced by the star power of filmmakers and the sexy programming team(s). They keep coming back due to their incestuous infatuation with these B-listers. “I don’t have friends, I have family”, they purr. On off days, they work on being as “moody and suave as Lee Kang Sheng”. They love to ice skate, visit Argentina and watch tik tok videos. Like a samurai, bran4gia has solely pledged their loyalty to SGIFF, bound by a code to serve their lords unto death.

< bran4gia has been promoted from SGIFF’s Film Warrior to Film Otaku. As foreign as bran4gia sounds, they have a fr4n in me. >

Burgundy wants to be David Wain’s A Futile and Stupid Gesture (2018). They treasure simple joys like laughing and talking to interesting people and filmmakers. <Maybe over some cheese and burgundy?> What keeps Burgundy volunteering is the chance to learn, to be part of a community that can uplift new voices. A poet, Burgundy loves to write and are inspired by the great poets who evoke big feelings from small images. They like to wind down with some tunes and attend music gigs from time to time.

< As cultured as Burgundy is, I hope their Futile and Stupid Gesture isn’t alcoholism. A person who likes to learn and meet interesting people must have a rich inner world. I hope one day it ages into something complex, deep, and delicate. >

p3ace&l0ve would be Korean indie film by Jeon Go-woon, Microhabitat (2017). Slightly jaded, moving all the time, seeking a sense of place. Wide-eyed and ever ready, p3ace&l0ve first volunteered in the hospitality department in 2014. It felt like a whole new world to them as they were just getting to know the industry. As a wanderlust, they continue to be inspired by various film festival cultures abroad, where volunteers show an exuberance of passion and enthusiasm. p3ace&l0ve has a love for the culinary arts and good craftsmanship. They are inspired by people who live for deep passion and care in the life they lead. On good days, they enjoy camping in the wilderness.

< p3ace&l0ve, you starry-eyed vagabond. I hope your sojourn will lead you to a home filled with p3ace&l0ve. I hope you find the same awe and wonder like how you did when the industry felt like a whole new world to you. >

The spirit of a festival has always been about celebration. You cannot fabricate merrymaking since it is an environment that organically forms through collaboration. Transactional relationships will create NPCs out of all of us — tempting, in this industry of endless deal-making and people-meeting. I do not wish to succumb to pragmatic bluntness nor soggy aspirations. Instead, to be cognisant of a present and invisible sea of love, support and connection. Just as effective change cannot operate in silos, not to advance is to go back. Volunteers remind us of the fact that we are all part of something larger than ourselves. Volunteers remind us to celebrate.

Dedicated to our cherished SGIFF volunteers old and new: May the countenance of Edward Yang, Agnès Varda, and Sergei Parajanov always shine upon you <3

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Grace Song is a Singaporean artist and writer-director. Her films approach dreams and neurodivergent cognition to reveal alternative experimentations.

Dear readers,

As filmmakers across the region gather in Singapore for the Southeast Asian Short Film Competition, which begins today, The Daily will begin publishing an essay related to short films in the programme.

Issue 9 presents two essays on short film. We begin with a piece by filmmaker and editor-in-chief of Southeast Asian film publication, MARG1N magazine, Seng Savunthara. He writes about Socheata Van’s Fresh as Daisy (2025), and the writer-director’s shift from documentary to fiction filmmaking as a means of narrating a lived experience. Next, film journalist and QCinema shorts programmer Jason Tan Liwag, reflects on the regional short film economy, examining how festival requirements for premiere status are increasingly impeding filmmakers who stand to gain more from the unrestricted circulation of their work.

Issue 9 will be available at Oldham Theatre and the FFIGS Lounge at Goethe-Institut. 📮

Few festivals in the region face this problem more immediately and profoundly than SGIFF. Since the 2014 inception of the Southeast Asian Short Film Competition, SGIFF has become a regional hub for short filmmakers to converge and share their films, exchanging ideas, meeting collaborators, all identifying and responding to what is distinctly Southeast Asian in cinema. Kirsten Tan, Lucky Kuswandi, Danech San, Riar Rizaldi, Carlo Francisco Manatad, Kavich Neang, and Sorayos Prapapan had won short film awards at SGIFF, building momentum and support within and outside the region.

Part of SGIFF’s pull is its institutional prominence. The festival was the only Oscar-qualifying film festival in Southeast Asia until the Bali International Film Festival (Bali IFF) joined its ranks recently. With entry fees waived for early-bird submissions, and a savvy programming team engaged with up-and-coming regional filmmakers, Singapore has become a destination for emerging talents seeking visibility and camaraderie. Historically, the festival has prioritised a world or regional premiere for short films to be considered in the programme. In this year’s lineup alone, 14 of the 25 films in the Southeast Asian Short Film Competition, which “highlights the best short cinematic gems from the region”, are at least Southeast Asian premieres.

But the terrain has shifted dramatically. Southeast Asia now has a more diverse festival ecology than a decade ago. From Chaktomuk in Cambodia and Ho Chi Minh IFF in Vietnam, to Jogja-NETPAC and Minikino in Indonesia, as well as the recently revived Bangkok IFF in Thailand, other festivals have cultivated a dynamic, decentralised circuit that prioritises the free circulation of films over exclusivity, allowing filmmakers to build momentum through multiple screenings across festivals rather than waiting for a single “big” debut. Singapore, by contrast, has developed a vexing reputation for chasing premieres and restricting its grantees from premiering at other Southeast Asian festivals, even if the stories originate from these countries and the audiences these festivals attract differ from SGIFF’s.

It isn’t the only festival to enforce these requirements, but a structural emphasis on premieres inevitably narrows the range of works it can select. Festivals cannot simultaneously reject aesthetic conformity while reinforcing procedural conformity. SGIFF reserves several privileges — accommodations and flights — for filmmakers with works whose world and regional premieres are at the festival. While this incentivises filmmakers who prioritise the festival, it also penalises filmmakers who have built momentum earlier and elsewhere.

The effect is subtle but visible: the festival’s curatorial fingerprint now appears to be muddled by the logistical demands of securing premieres rather than curatorial intent, leaving them more reactive than thoughtful. Since SGIFF occupies a symbolically central role in Southeast Asia’s short-film ecosystem, these choices reverberate across the region.

Some convergence in festival lineups will be inevitable. But an insistence on premiere status introduces artificial scarcity into an environment built on community, collaboration, and cross-border exchange. Consider that Clermont-Ferrand, one of the world’s oldest and most influential short film festivals, does not have restrictions in its premiere status, nor does Sundance. In 2025, film producer and researcher Stephen Follows found that across 10,549 film festivals worldwide, over 93.8% had no restrictions on premiere status, and only 0.2% required world premieres, highlighting how exclusivity and prestige are prioritised by only a small fraction of festivals globally.

In a 2020 Talking Shorts panel titled, “What’s The Point of A Premiere Status?”, programmer and public funding coordinator Julie Rousson suggests that imposing the commercial model of a “premiere status” is counterproductive to the economy and philosophy of short-form cinema. According to Rousson, premiere status is a capitalist model for feature films that is not suitable for the short film industry, which is more progressive at its core. She argues that it would be better to give as many chances as possible for a good film to find an audience.

Premiere requirements did not emerge from malice. At its best, it is enforced to foster diversity in the films and filmmakers that are platformed in festivals. In that vein, SGIFF deserves immense credit for spotlighting new filmmakers, especially student filmmakers, who are often overlooked in favour of big-name directors. Such limits also prevent Western festivals from dominating lineups with the same handful of titles, diluting aesthetic and narrative diversity. Unlike features, shorts do not often rely on acquisitions or pre-sales. Most short films do not have distributors or sales agents. Their value comes from circulation, exposure, and the relationships they help filmmakers build. Attempts at preserving premiere status in Southeast Asia often do a disservice to the films and the filmmakers themselves, suspending their exposure for prolonged periods, only to be rejected later and left with no platform to present their film.

The question is not whether SGIFF should abolish premiere requirements entirely, but whether its policies reflect the needs of the filmmakers it wants to champion. The region is no longer defined by scarcity but by abundance. Filmmakers are already collaborating and creating communities that extend far beyond traditional festival hierarchies. Considering the sharp increase in international co-productions even in the short film format, this is a question that demands consideration.

SGIFF platformed short films from some of our most exciting directors even before audiences’ taste caught up with them. Southeast Asia would be an entirely different landscape without it. But if our short film ecosystem is to continue growing, one of its most influential institutions must evolve alongside it. Premiere status might have once opened doors to opportunity; today, it often stands in its way.

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Jason Tan Liwag is a scientist, writer, and curator from the Philippines who explores the life cycle of moving images and criticism in Southeast Asia.

Based on her life, the short film is written and directed by Socheata Van. This is her first fiction project, marking a departure from her documentary roots. When I asked Van if the documentary medium would have been appropriate for the story she wanted to tell, she told me that the documentary mode would have been intolerable, emphasising the cruelty it would inflict on her by approaching its subject too directly. In Van’s words, the female protagonist, Srean, and her grandmother “mirror” Van’s personal relationship with her grandmother. The film is a form of displacement, rather than autofiction.

The film exposes the delicate workings of familial oppression, unfolding in spaces that mark the threshold of what we understand as home. We witness conversations between the girls, Srean and Da, from the balcony, bathroom, and kitchen, and over the phone. For them, home is both shelter and constraint, an interpersonal limbo.

At home, Srean and Da live in a silence sustained by family expectations and societal norms. But with each other, the characters speak with a candour possible only in the absence of their parents, who are always out of view. We never see any authority figures on screen, though the two often refer to them in conversation, and they are heard passing judgments on the girls. On their own, Srean and Da complain, tease each other, dream up implausible futures for themselves, and express their dissatisfaction with a K-drama that defers a kiss scene to the following week’s episode. Even in the media they consume, desires are continually frustrated.

Midway through the film, the girls visit a fortune-teller, who envisions a soulmate for Da, “a person from overseas”. To the girls, this means that a rich man will come along and save them. Moments later, Srean steps outside to take a call with her grandmother, while fixing her gaze on the people inside. She is once again on the threshold, torn between home and the outside world, reality and the fantasy of escape. The friends ultimately diverge in their life choices: Srean concedes freedom in exchange for a roof, while Da runs away from an arranged marriage, sacrificing the security of home.

With such a personal film, it is hard not to read the director’s own sentiments into the script, especially when you know her yourself. Van and I used to work together, and I was involved in the production of this film as a data wrangler. She shared that the driving force of the film is not teenage rebellion, but a kind of simmering desire, a pursuit of validation.

When asked about the significance of the film’s titular flower, Van sent me the following note:

First, ‘daisy’ sounds sweet to me. It reflects my longing for love. I want to be loved by everyone: my family, my friends, and my colleagues. It’s a personal need. When you grow up without love, you become starved for affection and attention. Second, ‘daisy’ represents a new beginning, and joy. I want to step out of my comfort zone and find happiness in a new environment, with strangers.

Torn between affirmation from their community, and the yearning to break free, the characters are now poised to enter the next stage of life, just as the filmmaker looks towards a still uncertain future.

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Savunthara Seng is a writer and filmmaker from Cambodia.

Last night, Lucrecia Martel interrogated land ownership and colonialism through a multitudinous survey of harrowing courtroom proceedings over the death of Chuschagasta leader, Javier Chocobar, and a flight through indigenous mountains in her remarkable Landmarks (Nuestra Tierra, 2025). At the Q&A, she spoke of her filmmaking process as a wait for a “spiraling ascendant moment,” when the arbitrary organisation of truth is revealed. Cinema, then, has the capacity to alter our perception.

Our eighth issue probes the frontiers of perception in cinema. Our editor Tracey Toh writes on the sonic vibrations of Julián Galay’s Intersections (2025) and performance-lecture, MÍMESIS (Dreams, animals and tuning forks) (2024) which transcend boundaries of self and other, creating the conditions to tune in and contribute to a multispecies symphony. Next, film programmer and educator Viknesh Kobinathan attempts to distinguish between different sections at the festival, remarking on the perplexing and artificial divisions that such categories introduce.

Issue 8 is now available in print at Oldham Theatre and the FFIGS Lounge at Goethe-Institut. 📮

Whether we are drawing nation-state borders or carving up a film festival into bounded terrain, mapmaking is never a neutral exercise. The cartographer determines the representational shape and effect of space, guiding user navigation. But SGIFF’s programming cartography can leave audiences feeling lost. Without ample contextualisation, it is hard to know what distinguishes each section. After years of engaging with the festival as a dedicated audience member and occasional guest programmer, I still struggle to understand the overlapping themes and film selections that could potentially fit into any section, or multiple sections at once. This confusion is compounded by sections that have come and gone through the years. MILESTONE lasted just one year in 2021. ALTITUDE was canned in 2024, after two years. DOMAIN lasted four editions before being dropped this year. LANDMARK was added in 2023. This map is obtuse and inconsistent, the lines it charts constantly blurring in and out of focus. Look away for a short while and entire areas can disappear in an instant, with no clear explanation or note.

But if there is a strong subjective point-of-view guiding these decisions, whose is it? Who is SGIFF’s map for, and what does it do? Does it help audiences decide what films to watch? Or is it perhaps a series of templates, led by arbitrary boundaries, that helps SGIFF and its programming team justify what goes where? Let’s take a film like Chan Sze-Wei’s 10s Across the Borders (2025), for example, a documentary about Southeast Asia’s burgeoning queer ballroom scene. The film did not make the cut for the Asian Feature Film Competition section, which includes works that “capture the vibrant pulse of Asian cinema today” through “bold new cinematic vision”. Yet, it is apparently “a celebrated work from the international film festival circuit” that will “expand our horizons”, so it is parked under the HORIZON section. The parcelling and packaging of films with such buzzy marketing language, simultaneously essentialises films and ‘others’ them. A judgment is made on what is fringe — films that are niche and marginal, appealing to narrow audience segments — and what belongs in the centre — works that supposedly possess a quality and excellence that a broad viewership would appreciate.

How can a film festival be more expansive and prismatic in its view of contemporary cinema, allowing for blips and glitches within its neatly arranged shelf of moving images? Maybe it should lean into its inconsistencies and come up with new sections every edition, dynamic and always in conversation with the shifts and transformations in the cinema of each passing year.

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Viknesh Kobinathan (he/they) is a cultural worker, programmer, and educator, whose practice explores the gathering around sound and image as an act of care, healing, rest, and refusal.

Multidisciplinary artist Julián Galay’s Intersections (2025) opens with night vision footage captured in complete darkness. In the subtitles, he writes that he is in search of a dream and begins with the scientific discovery that dreams are not exclusive to humans. Drawing on a growing body of research, Galay sets out to gather evidence that humans have plenty in common with other forms of life. The film unfolds like a private dream journal, with personal notes, snippets of interviews, video excerpts from scientific experiments, and key words that flash up on screen, charting the artist’s preoccupations.

We learn that animals have complex dreamscapes. At night, zebra finches silently exercise their vocal muscles, improvising songs for the following day. Flycatchers produce nocturnal trills indicative of nightmares. Spiders, too, enter cycles of REM sleep, the stage where the most vivid dreams occur. If birds and spiders dream, as these studies suggest, they are not simply mechanical creatures but intelligent, thinking selves, much like humans. The film impresses this on us through the persistent use of match cuts: the gossamer of a spider’s web echoing the intricate system of overpasses in the city; the spherical beam of a flashlight mirroring the soft glow of a full moon in the sky — geometries in nature that find close parallels in manmade objects and infrastructure. At one point, we witness a howler monkey playing with the camera, toggling the buttons as if it were making a vlog on selfie mode. We gaze at the animals, and sometimes, they gaze back, as if curious about us too.

The documentary is composed of such vignettes and trivia, making its themes easy to identify, though the trajectory of its message is harder to trace. If the film resembles a lucid dream, however, Galay’s performance-lecture, MÍMESIS (Dreams, animals and tuning forks) (2024) is like the conscious mind at work, ordering information in a more legible manner. Through this pedagogical format, Galay details his extensive research, drawn from Instagram reels, dubious sources, and bizarre academic projects. Besides the empirical studies cited in the film, Galay also recounts strange and improbable tales about human-animal interactions. One story involves a hospital in Switzerland, where patients blamed crows roosting in nearby trees for their recurring nightmares, believing the crows were infecting their minds. This turns out to be an urban myth.

Weaving together scientific inquiry and speculative fabulation, Galay presents animals as a source of enduring fascination for humans. We study the dreams of birds and spiders because we yearn to access the interiority of the creatures that share the earth with us. Yet, we can only grope our way to an understanding of animal consciousness, always at the risk of anthropomorphism, never fully inhabiting the perceptual world of a non-human other.

This does not have to leave humans trapped in our consciousness. Trained as a music composer, Galay attunes us to sound as a sophisticated mode of communication. Using various tuning forks, he produces vibrations on-site, demonstrating the different pitches and frequencies that make sound meaningful to animals. Spiders, he notes, are highly discerning. At a certain pitch, a tuning fork held close to a web simulates the presence of a predator, forcing the spider into retreat; another pitch signals the presence of prey, leading the spider to reach out to the metal prong, anticipating its next meal.

Sound forms the basis of a precise semiotic system, which animals deploy in their own adaptive mechanisms. Galay explains that some species of moths emit the same ultrasonic clicking as larger, unpalatable moths to elude predators, while bats imitate the buzzing of hornets and wasps to protect themselves from owls. Acoustic mimicry breaks down the barriers between one species and another. Where does the self begin and end, when we sample so promiscuously from each other?

While sound may be the mode by which we enter into multispecies semiosis, it threatens the integrity of the self. Unlike vision, which relies on a separation between subject and object, sound is not observed from a safe distance. We are physically immersed in it, because sound is vibrational, resonating through bodies and space. We call a high-pitched shriek piercing because it penetrates the ear canal, crossing the threshold between inner world and external reality, rendering the self porous. The earnest listener must surrender to such violation, and even invite this violence upon the self, if we are to participate in a chorus of earthly critters.

Produced after the performance-lecture, which unpacks the material accumulated from six years of research, the film is liberated from the need to explain or guide us through this trove of insights. Like a sequence assembled by the unconscious, Intersections bids us to dream and to listen, to become susceptible to the influences around us. It ends with shaky handheld footage from Galay’s video diaries, shot in darkness once again, played against a soundtrack composed specifically to induce sleep. The images onscreen are blurry and indistinct, akin to Impressionist paintings that might lull us into a state of repose, or hold us in rapture. As the soporific music plays, I allow myself to drift into the sound, into the rich semiotic life thrumming around, and within, me.

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Tracey Toh is an arts writer and researcher who practises creative criticism in response to film and performance.

Dear readers,

As we pass the midway point of the festival, we turn our attention to kinship and the complexities of building or sustaining community.

In this issue, our writers examine how individual goodwill and pre-existing communal ties can be exploited, and trust broken — from filmic depictions of the fraught relationships between individuals and their families of origins, or found families, to the problems involved in nurturing a cinephile community.

In our first review, FIPRESCI Jury member Amarsanaa Battulga examines the ethics and complications of the Rental Family (Hikari, 2025) industry. Next, Morris Yang writes on how loyalty to one’s community and autonomy can exist alongside each other without being reconciled in Asian Feature Film Competition Shape of Momo (Tribeny Rai, 2025). Finally, Benjamin Yap provides a critical reflection of the Cinephile Pass, questioning the purpose of an accreditation that seems to prioritise other interests over serving its fervent fans.

Issue 7 will be available at Oldham Theatre and the FFIGS Lounge at Goethe-Institut. If you’re looking for other issues in print, FFIGS Lounge still has limited copies of Issues 5 and 6 available. Issues 1-4 are no longer available at both venues. 📮

Introduced the year after the closure of the Youth Critics Programme, the pass feels like a sub-par experience for a cinephile, especially when participants must submit an application, prove their cinephilia by promising content coverage for the festival, and “donate” $50 to gain access to an experience that feels like an afterthought. What the pass provides as a whole does not contribute to nurturing nascent cinephiles, or indeed, to supporting budding film critics seeking opportunities to write about films in an environment bereft of film media outlets and editorial support.

After my experience with the Cinephile Pass last year, I tried to circumvent the limitations of the pass this year by requesting press accreditation through my film podcast, Deep Cut, to continue our film festival coverage, especially since foreign film festivals have been extending press accreditation to us. However, SGIFF asked us to first propose the kind and amount of press coverage we would provide for the festival if accredited, which I declined to do knowing that more established press platforms would not have been made to do the same. It is odd to see how the festival so strictly gatekeeps press access in Singapore, where the number of people doing coverage like this is already limited by resource constraints.

It feels like the festival is sizing up how press and content creators can serve to increase its profile, rather than how SGIFF can serve the film community at large. We are struggling with dwindling public interest in films and the cinema experience. As a non-profit supported by government funding, SGIFF is one of the film institutions in Singapore best positioned to aid in this cause, in a way that nurtures the community beyond the number of tickets sold and the perceived prestige of the festival within the region.

Film festivals provide a temporal locus of a city’s cinema culture and a festival’s accreditation process indicates the kind of audience they want to attract. The Industry Pass and SGIFFriends Pass indicate a festival that prioritises film production and donor privileges. The Cinephile Pass is barely a gesture towards giving a passionate community access to the festival. If the festival seeks to target an audience of young critics, cinephiles, and content creators, the festival should review the structure of the pass to better serve this community, which has the same goal as the festival: to create a vibrant atmosphere for moviegoing, and to watch some good fucking movies.

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Benjamin Yap co-hosts Deep Cut: A Film Podcast, writes about films on The Kinetoscope, and maintains filmbulletin.sg. Find him at benjaminyap.me.