Rest in peace, Theo Angelopoulos

Yesterday, just like many other times, I woke up to the beeping sounds of Facebook chat, alerting me of incoming messages.

It was a film festival programmer friend of mine, his message was this:

Edmund, this has to do with one of your favourite film topics, Theo Angelopoulos. He had just died in a traffic accident, ran over by a motorbike!

Two of my shorts, LAST FRAGMENTS OF WINTER and GIRL IN THE WATER at Rotterdam International Film Festival 2012

After only a few days in Malaysia to celebrate Chinese New Year, I'm flying off again in less than 24 hours to Netherlands for the Rotterdam International Film Festival.

Both my short film LAST FRAGMENTS OF WINTER (making its European premiere) and another, GIRL IN THE WATER by Danish director Jeppe Ronde and my regular collaborator Woo Ming Jin ("THE TIGER FACTORY", "WOMAN ON FIRE LOOKS FOR WATER"), which I helped to produce and edit, will part of the WAITING FOR SNOW IN MY KAMPONG program.

A simple reunion dinner @ my home (Chinese New Year 2012)

After a few days of shoot in Taipei, and then another few days in Hong Kong for the post-production session, I returned to Tokyo for half a day, before making my way back to Malaysia for Chinese New Year.

It was the morning of January 20th. Tokyo was snowing for the very first time in 2012.

Hiroshi Teshigahara's films and Ikebana

It's been a busy week.

My friend Dawn Yang (she's also something of an unofficial mascot of this blog. Look at the 'most popular posts' on your right, people generally stumble onto this website because they were looking for her or the exposing of her alleged boyfriend) had just came to Tokyo for a visit, so I was showing her around. If you were following on Twitter, you'll spot these tweets.

My segment in '60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero' also mentioned in NEGATIV

This article by Dennis Vetter at the highly-regarded German film website NEGATIV came out just a few days after the Dec 22 screening of the omnibus film '60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero' (on Christmas Day, actually).

I saw this article shortly after it was published and browsed through it hoping that I could understand something with my limited German skills. Unfortunately, the only word I recognized was my own name.

So I ran this through Google Translation and here's a rough translation about what the article said regarding 'I DREAMT OF SOMEONE DREAMING OF ME', my contribution to the omnibus film.

I was mentioned in Hollywood Reporter's review of '60 Seconds of Solitude in the Year Zero'

It's a great way to start the year. The stunningly beautiful balloons of the Zojo-ji New Year Countdown. An epic dinner of desserts with Dawn Yang yesterday.

Had an epic dessert meal with @DawnYang1 our eating skills are surprisingly equal, even though we're both so slender twitter.com/greatswifty/st…
— Edmund Yeo (@greatswifty) January 2, 2012

And today, on the 3rd day of 2012, Maggie Lee's review of 60 SECONDS OF SOLITUDE IN YEAR ZERO (omnibus film I participated in) on Hollywood Reporter had this to say about my segment "I Dreamt Of Someone Dreaming Of Me".

Thousands of balloons in the air during the countdown to 2012 @ Zojo-ji Temple, Tokyo

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

Well, I wasn't expecting to end 2011 with such a downer of a post.

Therefore, I'm going to start this year with a bang, by showing you a video I shot of the countdown to 2012 at Zojo-ji Temple that I went to last night.

(... there was also a rather big earthquake right before I started writing this, when it was shaking, I was sitting on my bed, quietly wondered how serious would it get. And as I was thinking, the quake stopped. Apparently, it was a Magnitude 7.0 earthquake.)

But anyway, here's the video.