Saturday, April 05, 2008

[SIFF08] Musings - Day One



This is where I list down random thoughts from the experience of the festival. Sometimes irrelevant, and the usual raves and rants that form part of the experience.

1. Stay until the end of every movie. Lucky 7 has a coda which 2/3 of the audience from the first screening missed because they walked out of the hall far too early. Too bad for them! BTW It's anyone's guess who directed that bit of it!

2. The screenings were dangerously not starting on time. Lucky 7 at the National Museum was about 20-25 minutes late, although it's a morning movie and the next screening doesn't happen until 2pm.

3. It takes about 20 minutes on foot to walk from Sinema Old School to The Substation, so do the math to get to National Museum from Sinema Old School.

4. For those walking, you have no choice but to tackle all the 136 steps. One of the alternatives involving the Cathay Cineplex, a fireman lift and a car park ramp, has a guard stationed to turn all pedestrians back to where they came from. So plan your foot journey wisely. The risk adverse should seek good exercise from negotiating the 136 steps, where I still continue to hear curses from those trekking up, and even from those trekking down!

5. The mixing of genres is bad, specially when you have a known target audience for a particular movie, who probably might not be as gung-ho about broadening and opening up to questionable sexual morals. Lesson learnt of course, while there's good intentions and exercising of freedom of expression yadda yadda, respecting the sensitivities of different communities, go a long way, especially when they're caught totally offguard as to what they're gonna see on the big screen.

6. The SIFF Trailer is shown prior to every screening, so for those who are watching 100 movies, you get to see it 100 times. For those who can't get enough, then you can watch it on YouTube too! It's a good introduction to some of the local filmmakers as well, so see if you can spot any of them during your festival screenings!

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