Cineodeon 2008 will be featuring the following selection of Singapore films. Films are divided into the Features and Shorts categories.
Click the tags above to view films under these categories.
Show All Films' Details
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12 Storeys / 十二楼 (PG)
Director: Eric Khoo
Runtime: 105 mins
Languages: English, Cantonese, Hokkien, Teochew, Malay
Subtitles: English, Mandarin
Year of Release: 1997
Show Synopsis
A young man jumps to his
death from an HDB block and returns to it in spirit, only to encounter the struggles
of three groups of its inhabitants. The first revolves around strait-laced Meng,
who is in charge of his younger sister Trixie and brother Tee while their parents
are away. Meng sets strict rules for his siblings and when they begin to rebel,
Meng takes it upon himself to keep them in check. The second concerns the unhappily
married couple of middle-aged hawker Ah Gu and his attractive Chinese bride Lili.
Lili's expectations of Ah Gu providing her with a comfortable life are unfulfilled,
and as a result she spurns his advances to start a family and goes out often, fuelling
much jealousy on his part. The last group is San San and her mother, who incessantly
chastises the single and overweight San San for her shortcomings. The mother compares
her to Rachel, a successful lady whom she used to take care of and is the apple
of her eye. When Rachel pays a visit, San San must come face-to-face with her inadequacy.
Show Director's Bio
 Eric
Khoo put Singapore on the international film map with his first feature film Mee
Pok Man (1995). His second feature 12 Storeys (1997) was the first
Singaporean film to be invited officially to participate in the 50th Cannes Film
Festival (1997). He has also produced and co-produced films such as the local comedy
hit, Liang Po Po – The Movie (1999), and One Leg Kicking (2001),
15 (2003) directed by Royston Tan, and his third feature film, Be With
Me which was selected as the opening film for the Directors' Fortnight
Cannes 2005. His latest feature film, My Magic is selected for Cannes official
selection main competition.
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Eating Air / 吃风 (PG)
Directors: Kelvin Tong Weng Kian & Jasmine Ng Kin Kia
Runtime: 108 mins
Languages: Hokkien, English, Mandarin, Malay
Subtitles: English, Mandarin
Year of Release: 1999
Show Synopsis
Ah Boy is a teenager whose days are scheduled around playing arcade games,
riding his motorcycle, drinking and having fun with his delinquent friends. His
self-indulgent lifestyle is further invigorated by his fantasies of being like a
martial arts hero in comic books. In the midst of a brawl one day, he crosses paths
with Ah Girl, a withdrawn and neglected daughter of a single mother. Consequently,
Ah Boy and Ah Girl drift into a blissful romance. Their happiness is short-lived,
for when Ah Boy's friend comes into possession of a pack of drugs, they are inadvertently
embroiled in a gang tussle that threatens both their love relationship and lives.
Show Director's Bio
Kelvin Tong
 Best known for his award-winning 1999 kung-fu motorcycle movie, Eating Air,
Kelvin Tong is a brand name in cutting-edge Singapore cinema. Named as the best
Singapore movie to date in October 2003 by Singapore’s Mandarin national
broadsheet, Lianhe Zaobao, Eating Air represented Singapore
extensively in the international film-festival circuit.
His direction and original screenplay saw the Singapore movie winning The Young
Cinema Award at the 2000 Singapore International Film Festival and the FIPRESCI
prize at the 2000 Stockholm International Film Festival in has directed several
other films such as Moveable Feast, The Maid, Love Story, Men in White and Rule #1.
Jasmine Ng
 Having studied Film and Television at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University,
Jasmine has worked on award -winning TV commercials and feature- length films with
some of the best in the region, including local feature film 12 Storeys. After working
with Kelvin Tong on Moveable Feast, Jasmine continue to co-write, co -direct, edit
and produce the Singapore feature film, Eating Air with Kelvin.
As a creative director and executive producer with VHQ-TV, she has also created
the award-winning Afterlife presented on Discovery Networks Asia and recently completed
a documentary, Pink Paddlers.
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Homeless FC / 曙光球队 (NC16)
Directors: James Leong & Lynn Lee
Runtime: 104 mins
Languages: Cantonese, English
Subtitles: English
Year of Release: 2007
Show Synopsis
A documentary centered on the lives of a group of men in Hong Kong who struggle
with poverty and its attendant problems. Homeless FC tracks a year’s development
in the life of the Dawn Football Team that was formed to rehabilitate recovering
drug addicts, former gamblers, reforming alcoholics and ex-convicts. In the course
of the tumultuous year, the men train with the hope of being selected to represent
Hong Kong in the Homeless World Cup at Cape Town. Their experience motivates honest
re-assessment of their lives and instills within them new fortitude to start afresh
despite continuing adversities.
Show Director's Bio
James Leong and Lynn Lee
 Amongst
the burgeoning group of local documentarians that have debuted to critical success,
James Leong and Lynn Lee are two of the key figures on the rising Singapore documentary
circuit. Their feature-length documentaries have received nominations at celebrated
film festivals including Paris, Berlin and Kuala Lumpur. Based in Asia, they have
an interest in “finding unusual stories and telling them well” and have established
 themselves as documentarians dedicated to portraying the truth in a sensitive manner.
Lynn was invited by the United Nations-backed Commission for Reception, Truth and
Reconciliation to document the “Truth Hearings” and to help set up East Timor’s
first national television station.
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Money No Enough 1 / 钱不够用 (PG)
Director: Tay Teck Lock
Runtime: 94 mins
Languages: Hokkien, Mandarin, English, Cantonese, Malay
Subtitles: English, Mandarin
Year of Release: 1998
Show Synopsis
Three down on their luck friends face the perennial issue of financial woe. Chew
Wan-Keong is a middle-aged white-collar worker who spends more than he can afford
to, while Ong is a contractor who is up to his ears in debt. Rounding out the trio
is Hui, a hapless waiter at a coffee-shop. When Chew is passed over for promotion
in lieu of a new colleague, a chain of events is set off that pits his lack of educational
qualifications against the newfangled economy's young, highly educated worker. Meanwhile,
Ong borrows money from a loan shark, but becomes embroiled in trouble when he is
unable to settle his debt. At the same time, Hui develops an infatuation with a
customer at the coffee-shop, but discovers that his lack of financial clout makes
courting her complicated. Together, the three friends must hatch a plan to rescue
them from their pecuniary troubles.
Show Director's Bio
Tay Teck Lock graduated with an honours degree in Chinese Studies from the National University of Singapore.
He worked as a Channel 8 producer with the then-Television Corporation of Singapore (TCS) and left in 1994
to run his family's transporation business. Tay directed and was involved in the creative process of
developing the characters and jokes of Money No Enough 1, Singapore's 1998 top grossing home-grown movie.
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Perth: The Geylang Massacre (M18)
Director: Ong Lay Jin (Djinn)
Runtime: 108 mins
Languages: English, Mandarin, Teochew, Hokkien, Malay, Vietnamese, Tamil
Subtitles: Mandarin
Year of Release: 2004
Show Synopsis
Perth is the journey into the heart of Harry Lee, a 51 year-old part-time security
guard and taxi-driver. Dreaming of migrating to Perth, a paradise of tranquil in
Harry’s mind, he unwittingly gets entangled in the underworld of Singapore’s flesh
trade when he starts to ferry prostitutes to clients in order to fulfill his relocation
plans. When he takes an unhealthy interest in a Vietnamese prostitute who looks
like someone from his past, it awakens a desperate and dangerous attempt at personal
redemption from past transgressions, which also fuels the impotent rage that eventually
determines his fate.
Show Director's Bio

Djinn commenced his film career as 2nd Assistant Director on acclaimed Hong Kong
Director Yon Fan’s Bugis Street (1994). In 1998, he made the dark comedic short
By The Dawn’s Early Rise which won him the Best Short Film at the Singapore International
Film Festival and has since gained cult status. Djinn made Perth in 2004, which
swept four awards at the Lyon Asian Film Festival including Best Film. The film
was described as ‘the most coherent and authentic film to have ever come out of
Singapore’. It also won the Best New Talent award at the inaugural Hong Kong Asian
Film Festival. The film brought International recognition to Djinn and in 2005,
he was asked to adjudicate at the prestigious LV Hawaii International Film Festival.
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Singapore Dreaming / 美满人生 (PG)
Directors: Woo Yen Yen & Colin Goh
Runtime: 102 mins
Languages: Hokkien, English, Mandarin
Subtitles: English, Mandarin
Year of Release: 2006
Show Synopsis
Encompassing two generations of the middle-class Loh family, Singapore Dreaming
tracks the family's trials as its members chase their dreams. The son and the apple
of his father's eye, Seng, returns from his studies in America to a devoted girlfriend
and to family pressure to get married and make a name for himself. His sister, Mei,
married to an emasculated husband and expecting, has never been able to let go of
the parental neglect she feels she has suffered. Their parents, Poh Huat and Siew
Luan, have over the years fallen into a routine of banal preoccupations - nagging
and domestic chores on her part; fantasies about amassing material possessions on
his. When the patriarch wins the lottery, everyone rests their hopes on the windfall
delivering them from their struggles. They soon discover that their dreams remain
elusive and that the pleasures derived from material wealth are as transitory as
the possessions themselves.
Show Director's Bio
 Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen are a husband-and-wife creative team who are award-winning
filmmakers and multimedia producers. Founders of
www.TalkingCock.com, they have
directed and produced TalkingCock the Movie and eAhLong,com, which won the Special
Achievement Award at the 2001 Singapore International Film Festival.
Their most recent feature film, Singapore Dreaming, became the first Singapore film
to win three major international film awards: the Montblanc Screenwriters Award
at the 2006 San Sebastian International Film Festival, the Audience Award for Narrative
Feature at the 2007 Asian-American International Film Festival in New York, and
the Best Asian/Middle Eastern Film Award at the prestigious Tokyo International
Film Festival in 2007. In San Sebastian, Colin and Yen Yen were also nominated for
the Altadis-New Directors Award, the world’s largest prize for new film directors.
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Singapore GaGa (PG)
Director: Tan Pin Pin
Runtime: 55 mins
Languages: English, Mandarin, Malay, Arabic, Hainanese, Hokkien, Cantonese, Chaoyu, Fuzhou, Kejia
Subtitles: English
Year of Release: 2005
Show Synopsis
Singapore GaGa is a documentary charting the quirkiness of the Singaporean aural
landscape, presenting music and sounds that are forgotten or ignored. It consists
of vignettes by a variety of people, including buskers, dialect newsreaders, harmonica
players and the lady who voices the pre-recorded train announcements. While seemingly
unrelated, these musical and spoken performances cumulatively provide audiences
with a sense of life and history in Singapore.
Supported by

Show Director's Bio
 Pin Pin is a filmmaker born and living in Singapore who finds
this island, its history and surrounds very interesting. Singapore GaGa a documentary
about vernacular sounds of Singapore played to full houses at both the Singapore
International Film Festival and at the Substation, and has been invited to Rotterdam
International Film Festival and the Berlin House of World Cultures.
Her works have won more than twenty awards and nominations including a Student Academy
Award and Discovery Channel’s First time Filmmaker award for Moving House.
They
have screened in Cannes, Seoul and Arkansas. Her television credits include Afterlife,
which won two Asian TV Awards, Crossings: John Woo for Discovery Channel Asia and
Building Dreams for Singapore’s Arts Central.
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The Art of Flirting (PG)
Director: Kan Lume
Runtime: 80 mins
Languages: English, Mandarin
Subtitles: None
Year of Release: 2005
Show Synopsis
Told in four parts, The Art of Flirting chronicles the stages of the romance between
Leo and Lynn, from first encounter to its final outcome. They meet when Leo, an
athlete, is interviewed by journalist Lynn. The mutual attraction between them leads
to a series of dates, where in the process of exposing their most intimate details
to one another, they fall in love. However, their relationship soon takes an unexpected
turn.
Show Director's Bio
 One of Singapore’s new generation filmmakers, Kan’s debut feature The Art Of Flirting
was made with US$150, used two non-actors, shot in two days and won Best ASEAN Feature
at the Malaysian Video Awards 2005. His second feature, co-directed with Loo Zihan,
Solos, was banned locally for its explicit homosexuality theme and was the first
Singaporean film to compete at AFI Los Angeles and picked up the “Premio Nuovi Sguardi”
Award at the Torino GLBT Film Festival.
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The Road Less Travelled / 轨道 (PG)
Director: Lim Suat Yen
Runtime: 90 mins
Languages: Mandarin, English
Subtitles: English
Year of Release: 1997
Show Synopsis
A group of idealistic friends in their twenties struggle to fulfill their artistic
dreams in pragmatic Singapore. Amongst them is Ah Jie and Shiyun, a couple who sing
xinyao ballads together and dream of making a name for themselves in the music industry.
Their relationship and aspirations are put to the test when Ah Jie's mother decides
to migrate to America, and Ah Jie is faced with a choice between personal desires
and filial obligation.
Show Director's Bio
 Yen loves to turn the impossible possible. She feeds on challenges,
and can run on full steam overcoming one obstacle after another in a typical production
cycle. She is a calm and sharp troubleshooter, and juggles numerous productions
seamlessly but yet still keep her warm smile. Yen graduated from Film Production
in New York University and broke the dormant feature film market with her directorial
debut, The Road Less Travelled in 1996. Since then, she has produced and directed
several feature films, telemovies and documentaries. With her strong foundation
and vast experience in production, Yen oversees and manages all the productions
at Oak 3 Films.
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They Call Her…Cleopatra Wong (NC16)
Director: Bobby A. Suarez (as George Richardson)
Runtime: 88 mins
Languages: English
Subtitles: None
Year of Release: 1978
Show Synopsis
Cleopatra Wong, a beautiful and formidable female Interpol agent, is sent to investigate
a crime syndicate's plot to manufacture and distribute copious amounts of counterfeit
currency that will put the economies of the ASEAN region in jeopardy. Her search
for leads brings her to various countries like Singapore, Hong Kong and Manila,
where she finally discovers the location of the headquarters for these covert operations
- within the premises of a Catholic monastery. Together with her trustworthy aides,
Cleopatra attempts to storm the building and eventually succeeds, but not without
encountering her share of loss.
Show Director's Bio
 Born in the Philippines, Roberto A. Suarez, commonly referred to as "Bobby" or "BAS",
produced and directed Bionic Boy and They Call Her Cleopatra Wong, which served
as the launching vehicle of the movie career of Miss Doris Young, whom Bobby gave
the screen name – "Marrie Lee". Cleopatra Wong’s cult character so impressed a young
Quentin Tarrantino and that she became the inspiration for his Kill Bill movies.
Bobby was the recipient of several awards including the Gregorio Valdez Memorial
Award by FAMAS, the Philippine equivalent of the ‘Oscars’ and the Ciriaco Santiago
Memorial Award for introducing Filipino-produced movies into the international market.
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Unarmed Combat / 铁男 (PG)
Director: Han Yew Kwang
Runtime: 95 mins
Languages: English
Subtitles: English
Year of Release: 2006
Show Synopsis
This film is a comedy about human obsessions. Metal owns a laundry shop. His three workers, Yingzheng, Ah Guang and Kasi, respect him.
His wife, Fendie, fears him. But all that changes when Pingmei, a beautiful young masseuse steps into his shop. In an attempt to win
back his affection, Metal’s wife enters an arm-wrestling competition. Pingmei, a mistress to the president of the women's association,
trains for the competition as a testament to the love she has for him too. Everything culminates in the finals of the competition,
when Metal, who takes the place of his injured wife, meets the masseuse in a showdown of comedic proportions. Unarmed Combat is about
desperation, and the extent human beings would go to in order to satisfy their obsessions and fetishes.
Show Director's Bio
 Born
in 1975, Han Yew Kwang started his TV career at the age of 22. He has written and
directed several highly popular and successful TV series including a 13-episode
TV series, Folks Jumps Over The Wall for MediaCorp Studios. In the same
year, his 35mm thesis film The Call Home won the Best Short Film Award
at the 15th Singapore International Film Festival Silver Screen Awards. Yew Kwang
made his feature directorial debut with digital feature Unarmed Combat
in 2005, which garnered positive responses from both film critics and the general
audience when it was released theatrically in Singapore. In 2007, Yew Kwang made
his second feature 18 Grams of Love, commissioned by the Media Development
Authority of Singapore.
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Where The Sun Rises (PG)
Director: Grace Phan
Runtime: 79 mins
Languages: English
Subtitles: English
Year of Release: 2006
Show Synopsis
In this documentary, President Xanana Gusmao of East Timor leads us on a journey
through the tumultuous years in Timor-Leste's history by sharing insights gained
from the past 24-year struggle for independence and the young country's current
fight for freedom from hatred and for a viable future as a sovereign nation. Travelling
across the cloud-enshrouded mountains, emerald jungles and azure seas of Timor,
Gusmao brings us to hidden villages and people with powerful stories who live therein;
encounters with whom returns him repeatedly to the importance of forgiveness and
reconciliation with the Indonesian militia as well as pro-integration Timorese who
had tortured freedom fighters like him and his followers in the years of the struggle.
Show Director's Bio
 Award-winning filmmaker, television presenter and producer, Grace Phan, has anchored
a wide spectrum of general news, current affairs, business and feature programmes
during her eight years in television with CNBC and ABC Asia Pacific. She won the
"Best News Presenter" award in the 2000 Asian Television Awards, and was nominated
"Best News Anchor" in the 2002 New York Festivals. Where The Sun Rises (also known
as A Hero's Journey) is Grace’s first feature documentary film. She is currently
preparing to shoot her first feature film.
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