A stll from In The Room
The latest pit stop on my peripatetic life’s itinerary was Singapore, for a bunch of film and television-related celebrations. The Singapore International Film Festival is now 26, and put on a jolly good show, culminating in our own Gurvinder Singh’s Cannes title Chauthi Koot (The Fourth Direction) winning Best Film at the festival’s Silver Screen Awards. But the film in the news was Singaporean auteur Eric Khoo’s erotic drama In The Room (2015). Billed as the country’s first erotic film, Khoo narrates six stories set over decades in a room, which is a brothel within a hotel. The film has had festival play in Toronto, San Sebastian, Busan and London, and had its local premiere at the festival.
While the film played uncut, with an R21 rating at the festival, since audiences at such events are deemed to be niche, Singapore’s Media Development Authority (MDA) has not passed the film for commercial release in Singapore. Khoo is so far unwilling to make the cuts necessary to pass the film. Meanwhile, an MDA statement reads thus: “In consultation with the Films Consultative Panel, MDA had deemed two scenes in the movie In The Roomto have exceeded our classification guidelines for sexual content. MDA informally advised the distributor that the film could be classified R21, with edits for commercial release. However, the application was subsequently withdrawn. As such, MDA has not officially classified the film for commercial release.”
The country is no stranger to censorship, as mentioned previously in this column. Leading Singaporean documentarian Tan Pin Pin, who I had the great pleasure of having a conversation with, had her film To Singapore, With Love (2013) banned outright. The film looks at a bunch of Singaporean activists, student leaders and communists, who were exiled from the island nation in the 1960s and 70s for political reasons, as they make a trip to Malaysia and stay in a hotel overlooking their beloved country that they can never return to.
The MDA gave Tan’s film a ‘Not Allowed for All Ratings’ (NAR) classification, and issued the following statement: “MDA has assessed that the contents of the film undermine national security, because legitimate actions of the security agencies to protect the national security and stability of Singapore are presented in a distorted way, as acts that victimised innocent individuals. Under the Film Classification Guidelines, films that are assessed to undermine national security will be given an NAR rating. The individuals in the film have given distorted and untruthful accounts of how they came to leave Singapore and remain outside Singapore.”
This is the internet age and Tan has made her film available on the Vimeo platform, where anyone in the world, except in Singapore, can access it by paying a modest rental fee.
And within the country, anyone who knows the right workarounds can watch it too. Those huffing and puffing about the cuts meted out to Spectre and Angry Indian Goddesses in India can take some shallow comfort in the fact that we are not alone.
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