Archive for April 2015

'And the Wind Falls's is a short film by He Shuming that was nominated for Best Cinematography in the recent Singapore Short Film Awards. But really, this film deserved awards in other categories as well, including script and performance. We catch up with He Shuming on the making of this short film.

Synopsis

Millie, a housekeeper in a small-town motel, spends thankless days cleaning up after others as she dreams of overcoming her past and regaining custody of her estranged daughter. When Millie discovers a large sum of money in one of the motel rooms, her apparent good fortune forces her to question the true meaning of redemption.
And The Wind Falls - OFFICIAL TRAILER #2 from And The Wind Falls on Vimeo.

To find out more about 'And the Wind Falls', please check out the following links:

Website: www.andthewindfalls.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/andthewindfalls

Twitter: www.twitter.com/andthewindfalls

Instagram: www.instagram.com/andthewindfalls

Your film presented a very interesting study of social demographics in the US. What inspired the story?

I had a conversation with a friend about finding yourself in a situation where you’re caught in a victimless crime and trying to get around it. What are the moral implications, what would one do, etc. Also, I had to start writing a script for my thesis but I was going nowhere. All I knew was I wanted to make a film fronted by a female protagonist.

One weekend, I drove to Joshua Tree, trying to write and had some time to myself. The housekeeper at the motel was the only person I chatted with, and we talked briefly about our lives, about what we do for a living and about our families. She’s around my age, a first generation Mexican-American who grew up in in Los Angeles. I would say all these little details formed a basis in my head to make this film, and it sort of evolved from there.

There’s a lot of talk of late, about having more diversity in film and television. Being a non-white filmmaker residing in the States, I tend to lean towards creating lead characters that present a more normal representation of who we see on screen.

Are housekeepers are a treasure trove of stories? How close to reality is your story in the film?

Oh yes, they certainly are. There’re all sorts of people going in and out of motels, and housekeepers clean up after them. Housekeepers always seem invisible but they have such interesting observations. I find that the one person that no one really thinks about is often the center of the universe.

The story in the film is completely fictional, and developed over the course of a year before we started pre-production.

What was the casting process like? How did you find your actors?

We worked with our casting director, Jennifer Ricchiazzi for this film. When we met for the first time before hiring her, we talked about the script and the actors we were looking at; we had a dream list of actors that we think are suited for the roles, basically actors I imagined to be the characters when I wrote the script and Jennifer went out and short list actors for the auditions.

The casting process took about over slightly a month. We had callbacks for actors we liked and they did scenes together. Actors who came to read for the lead role of the housekeeper had to do chemistry reads with actors who were called back to play her daughter and mother-in-law. We went straight into rehearsal about 2 weeks before shooting. It was the shortest amount of time I had working with actors before shooting.

How did you work with your actors? Especially in your position as a foreigner directing a film rooted in localised issues.

Because of the short amount of time we had before the final cast were attached to the film, I workshopped in class with actors I had worked previously. I’ve learned so much from these actors, who were so giving and intelligent. The sessions were intense, but it helped with rewrites and allowed me to think of what I needed to talk about during actual rehearsals, which we didn’t have a lot of.

We had our first table read after our main cast were locked and had a discussion about the story and the characters. Leana Chavez, who played Millie, was such a giving and dedicated actor. We spent plenty of time talking during our rehearsal sessions, sharing experiences that they’ve heard, what would you do if you were the character, etc. I’ve learned so much from all my actors on this film and I think it’s important to look at the roots of what these characters are going through as human beings and realizing how universal the experiences can be.

Is this your first short film made in the US? How different is it making a film in the US as compared to Singapore?

This is my fourth short film made here. With And The Wind Falls, I felt like we had an army of people working together, like a well-oiled machine. There are definitely more rules designed to protect everyone working on a production. It’s just the way the industry is set up over decades of filmmaking, especially in Los Angeles. The permits, union rules, labour laws, etc. It’s very admirable, to be honest.

Also, this is the first time I budgeted reshoots for a film! We did pick up shots, added scenes and reshot an entire scene over the course of 2 days. It was such a luxury.

But other than that, I think the fascinating thing about filmmaking is wherever you shoot, cinema is our common language.

What were the greatest challenges you faced in making this film?

Before coming here, I was used to a certain kind of storytelling. Maybe it’s the sensibilities in cinema that I was accustomed to. I was used to taking my time with a scene, not wanting to rush anything and being a little too passive with my characters. I think with this film I wanted to be less passive, and I don’t know if I’ve succeeded completely.

Writing the script was a challenge, too. From the very first drafts, we had to decide if she was going to return the money or keep it for herself. Whatever she chose to do in the end poses all sorts of questions about why she did it in the first place, so it was really digging deep into the truth about her motivation and realizing there really isn’t a right or wrong answer, but I still need to decide her course of action and justify it.

We had a test audience when we had our first director’s cut, which helped us decide what made sense and what didn’t. It helped because we were so involved through the course of development and production that sometimes we lose track of whether the film told the story we really wanted to tell. And sitting through the honest critiques from a theatre of test audience can be one of the most gut-wrenching experiences a filmmaker can have. But it helped because their notes confirmed what we needed to work on for the reshoot and in our edit.

All the hell we go through as filmmakers only helped to serve the film.

Written by SINdie

Somewhere towards the end of the film, one of the 3 subjects, Artist Tang Ling Nah sits alone in front of the TV set watching Prime Minister deliver the National Day Rally, filled with the usual dogma of needing to stay competitive in a changing world. The all-so-familiar National Day staple song ‘We are Singapore’ plays and Ling Nah finds herself inevitably joining in the chorus. It is not entirely clear what’s going on in her head and she seems to be sniffing a bit at the chorus of the song.

Ling Nah is a visual artist who has bought a HDB flat for herself because she needs personal space for her work as an artist, away from her parents. What’s interesting is that she is not quite the run-of-the-mill ‘married with kids’ profile that HDB flats seem to favour but displays a passion for Singapore measurable to the ones you see in the annual National Day Parades. To put it bluntly, her position as an artist makes this quite an oxy-moron.

This is what the film is really pitched. At first contact, the film seems like a clichéd study of HDB living with the familiar 3-stories structure. But watching it in more detail reveals it to be a more enlightened and targeted observation of some of the biggest ironies in what Singapore has branded as one of the world’s most successful public housing projects.

03-Flats faithfully and unobtrusively follows three single women who live alone in their HDB flat and captures snapshots of their everyday activities, sometimes mundane, sometimes glorious and sometimes with pockets of surprises. The 3 women, while not enough to offer a cross section of society or provide a CMI (Chinese, Malay, Indian) broad look at HDB living, presents quite a diverse set of characters with unique circumstances. These circumstances in fact make the film more ironic. Ling Nah, as mentioned is an artist and has transformed her flat into a art studio as well, somehow conjuring thoughts of art-studio-homes in cities like New York or Paris. Mums looking at her flat and the clutter will be nagging till the cows come home, even though Ling Nah is really quite a meticulous cleaner when it comes to doing her regular housework. Amy Tashiana, from the entertainment business, has brought Hollywood to the neighbourhood. From boudoir-looking drapes to patterned crockery to sequined cushions to delightful bouquets of flowers, one immediately forgets the original cell-like structure of these public housing units. The third character Mdm Sim Boon Ngoh lives a Spartan life alone in her flat with her furnishing down to the basic essentials, but we are given a back story of how her flat, when her mother was around used to be the venue of numerous family gatherings and Chinese New Year reunion dinners.

Interjected throughout the film are snippets of absolutist propagandist national TV broadcasts from the 60s of the public housing construction progress and achievements, as well as quotes from the various ministers rationalising the existence of these public housing projects and why they have taken this form. With spot-on comic timing, these snippets are immediately cut to the drab, uninspiring scenes of the current day HDB corridors and void decks with rectangles, cells and boxes galore. In fact, hese are just flashes of visual irony that set the tone for the main drift. The choice of the 3 women’s stories offer main meat in the director’s ironic gaze at HDB living. Together, they stand in defiance to the intentions of the government’s policy, not in an angry way, but with a huge grin.

This rather ‘peaceful’ subversion of the conventional HDB living unit is characteristic of the overriding directorial style of Lei Yuan Bin. One defining feature of the film is the lack of any direct talking head accounts from the characters. The film is built from footages of an ‘observing’ camera, probably hidden in the background, quietly documenting these characters in near-natural states. It might be precisely the total reliance on candid, un-staged activity shots that have forced the director to think harder about how to paint a more vivid picture of the characters’ lives without them telling it to the camera. These included capturing Amy at her work rehearsals and Ling Nah during her family time at her parents’ home. This treatment is meditative but its pacing suffers sometimes when some scenes seem repetitive or pointless.

For the loose grip the director exerts on the narrative, the film sometimes becomes a random stroll in the park and you forget what the film is trying to point at or if it is actually pointing at anything. For instance, Amy’s Hari Raya party and the lead-up to it has such an addictive ‘reality-TV’ draw to it, once can be forgiven for forgetting what the film was posturing at. The film subconsciously lures the voyeur out in all of us, beckoning to us to wonder what Mdm Sim is cooking for dinner, what Ling Nah is painting next and if the cat is going scratch Amy in her sleep. Before you can say ‘housework porn’, the film thankfully makes an effort to link these back to broader issues at play, with the National Day Rally scene (mentioned at the start of this review) being a pivoting point in the film. The pro-longed take and Ling Nah’s seemingly raw reactions to the Rally speech and song offer some closure on our understanding of her relationship to the space and this place she calls home. We are not sure where they stand in the race for economic advancement and in fact, they sometimes seem ‘orphaned’ by progress that is gushing through everyone’s lives, but the film makes one strong point, that Ling Nah, like Mdm Sim and Amy, all genuinely have their hearts anchored in these cell-like structures that they call home.

Review by Jeremy Sing

This film was screened at the recent Singapore Chinese Film Festival and premiered at the Busan International Film Festival in 2014. Read more about the making of this film in our interview with director Lei Yuan Bin here.

Written by SINdie

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