HISTORY OF PERSPECTIVES

PERSPECTIVES – A BRIEF HISTORY

The Perspectives Film Festival, organised jointly by students from the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information (WKWSCI) and other students and professionals, is now in its fourth year. Every year we seek to bring to our audiences a different perspective on breakthroughs in cinema.

Ever since the cinematograph was invented, film makers became intrigued by the dynamism of film as a medium. Some experimented with the cinema's narrative capabilities, creating compelling stories out of moving images, fabricating convincing characters that audiences loved and hated.
Some documented reality, charging the camera with the task of recording life. Others manipulated time and space, excited by the unprecedented plasticity of the medium. With the advent of the digital age, film makers created alternative worlds with wilder imagination and even greater finesse. With all these come countless breakthroughs, each as significant as the one before. 

Poster for Perspectives Film Festival 2008

In 2008, the Perspectives Film Festival's inaugural year, we sought to explore the Golden Age of Singapore cinema – a milestone era when Singaporean cinema blossomed as a homegrown industry and made a name for itself in the region. Beautifully named "The Film Lovers' Guide to Living Well", the festival opened with Yi Sui's Lion City, recognised as Singapore's first Chinese film. With an emphasis on Malay films and P. Ramlee's Seniman Bujang Lapok as our closing film, the festival gave our audiences a glimpse of the glory days of early Singaporean cinema. 

Poster for Perspectives Film Festival 2009

Monster Mania, the second installment to our Perspectives Film Festival, was a decided deviation from the serious tone in the previous year. We were determined to find a genre that draws both young and old, a genre that people love and keep coming back to. With a free outdoor screening of Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah to open the festival, we decided to present audiences with a selection of monster films. We closed with Nosferatu, a classic horror film that inspired subsequent vampire films. Unprecedented was the collaboration with three musical groups in Singapore to produce and perform the score for the silent film. 

Poster for Perspectives Film Festival 2010

Reality versus fiction: this dialectic is often studied, explored and experimented upon in cinema. That was also our focus for Perspectives 2010. For our third attempt at exploring breakthroughs in cinema, we curated films that break the boundaries between what is real and what is made-up. The selection of films included Ari Folman's animated documentary Waltz with Bashir, the first full-length feature animated documentary in cinematic history, and Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark, the first and only feature shot in an uninterrupted 96-minute long take. These films flirt with reality and fiction, carving for themselves a new space between the longstanding genres of documentary and drama.

The Perspectives Film Festival is run annually by students taking the Film Festival Practicum course, offered by Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information. With help from instructors and professional collaborators, we learn the ropes of organising and executing a film festival – curating films, managing budgets, designing websites and writing for collaterals, securing locations and publicizing the festival. Being the premier student-run film festival of Singapore, we seek each year to offer our audiences an enjoyable and enriching festival that is known for curating groundbreaking cinema. We hope you enjoy Perspectives 2011, and come back for more in the years to come!