I never really expected this to happen, but the experimental video I assembled last year, FLEETING IMAGES, is finally making its international premiere simultaneously at two film festivals on the 18th of September. One is the 5th Singapore Short Film Festival (where it's selected for competition), the other is the Tokyo-based online film festival, CON-CAN Movie Festival.
"One day, I received an email from him…" A young woman narrates a series of letters from an old friend meditating on time, memory and mortality. He is seeking life’s meaning throughout his travels in India and Japan, but ends up finding beauty in some fleeting images of everyday life that he had previously overlooked.
Part documentary, part travelogue, maybe a love letter.
FLEETING IMAGES was made quite a while ago, back in July 2008, shortly after I went to Tokyo. (It was done even before LOVE SUICIDES!) I've kinda kept the film to myself because it is, after all, more an experimental video, or a video essay, than a short film, and I was unsure of its artistic merits back then.
This film isn't everyone's cup of tea, and it definitely ain't KINGYO. Some has even derided it as a cheap attempt to put something together to pass off as a film. In the end, after some pondering, I thought the condemnation towards FLEETING IMAGES was a little unfair, since the efforts I put in sifting through many hours' worth of unused stock footages and vacation video, and writing the voiceover narrative, and supervising the recording of said voiceover narrative, weren't exactly the easiest thing to do. Especially when I myself actually took a camera from uni and ran off to Odaiba and certain areas of Tokyo to shoot additional footage.
Whether the end result is good enough is up to audiences to judge. But I will definitely object to any accusations of this being a 'cheap attempt to do something that passes off as a film'.
Anyway, I'm few hours away from heading off to Singapore for the Singapore Short Film Festival, to present the film in the evening. There's also a radio interview in the afternoon. I've more or less recovered from my flu (ah, the magic of Panadol!), so I'm in pretty good shape, and excited about the trip.
I used to go to Singapore almost every other month, that was before I went to Perth and then Tokyo, so I had always been more familiar with, say, Orchard Road, than KL's Bukit Bintang, but these days my visit to Singapore had gone more and more infrequent.
For the rest of you, well, you can watch FLEETING IMAGES here on the CON-CAN website (members only, but registration is free, so some support is appreciated). Vote it based on how you feel about the film, and leave a review too!
