Daniel Hui’s whimsically harrowing black-and-white, closed-form film is a brilliant testament to the poetics of cinematic time, expressed wonderfully through the analogue, velvety precision of 16mm. Drawing on real-life events, factual socio-temporal and political coordinates, the film is evocative of sombre and tumultuous events in Singapore’s political past.
Amidst transcribing my conversation with Daniel Hui during the 68th BFI London Film Festival, news broke of his latest film Small Hours of the Night (2024) being banned in Singapore. While such news risks becoming an overrepresented angle, due to its trending potential, the film’s artistic integrity and refined aesthetic linger post-festival, inevitably shifting the focus back to the film itself.
The tactility in Clark and Gibisser’s film, its poetic, sculpture-like aesthetics, the respectful, organically alluring cinema verité style, alongside the poignant critique of historical patterns of extraction, expropriation, and ownership, offer much more than a compelling documentary film with matter that matters. From the slow, tentative movements of human actors feeling their way through survival with experienced care, dignity, and inquisitiveness, to automated, machine-learned gestures coordinating motion efficiency in tempo, reminiscent of Ballet Mécanique (Léger, Murphy, 1923), the film creates a sophisticated universe for the exploration of varied forms of technicity, materiality and materialism.
Vinay Shukla’s dignified character study is a poignant testament to the arduous task of protecting journalistic ethics, integrity and a code of conduct from becoming obsolete, in-between widespread misinformation and disinformation practices. Following the life, activities, work and choices that investigative journalist and news presenter Ravish Kumar makes, the film appropriates a sophisticated day-in-the-life-of style, to depict the legacy of one of the most celebrated Indian journalists.
As another successful edition of the BFI London Film Festival is slowly drawing to a close, the most memorable moments, films, quotes, scenes, sounds and feelings emerge not on-demand but organically and ask to occupy a place in our experience of film festivals; our sense of exhibition and curatorial concepts and practices, but most importantly what it is that we mean when we talk about film and cinema today.
We often hear the term "Father of African Cinema" associated with the great Senegalese author and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène. Indeed he is today recognised as an outstanding post-war African filmmaker, his work studied and taught universally- no genuine film academic or cinema historian can boast of never having come across his oeuvre during the course of their own research. Of course this is entirely due to the paucity of Africans that have worked in cinema and thus Sembène stands today as almost the sole historical black Sub-Saharan African progenitor and therefore representative of the global medium of cinema, who now, a hundred years after his birth, is to be honoured with a much deserved and necessary retrospective, courtesy of the British Film Institute (BFI Southbank) in London, one of Europe's leading film institutions.
