Digital technology offers unique opportunities to Southeast Asian filmmakers - By Tilman Baumgärtel

Increasingly international film festivals are showing independent movies by young Southeast Asian filmmakers. Often they tell stories examining the dark underbelly of the societies in which the filmmakers live.

Amir Muhammad was fussing with his PowerBook. The Malaysian filmmaker wanted to show some scenes from his new documentary, "Village People Radio Show," at the Southeast Asian Cinemas Conference in Kuala Lumpur. But his computer was on strike. "Is this the beginning of a comedie tragique?" he remarked wryly as he grinned sheepishly into the audience while a technician hurried to his aid. Then, suddenly, the film began to run and Amir was able to finish his presentation. When he was finished, he tucked his laptop under his arm, drove home and worked through the night on the soundtrack, using the very same computer. That was two months ago - now the finished film can be seen at this year's Berlinale film festival in the German capital.

Only a few years ago, this would have been impossible. Film production was teamwork that took place in expensive studios and editing suites. Now, the revolution in film production brought about by digital technology allows anyone to become a film director - all they need is access to a digital camera and a computer. If the flood of digitally produced, independent films coming out of Southeast Asia right now is any indication, a lot of people in the region are making use of the new opportunities.

In the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore, one-man production teams like Amir, working with minimal budgets, are producing films that can be seen around the world. Festivals for short or independent films are springing up in many major cities. The established media are beginning to take notice of "microcinema," as Malaysian film critic Anuar Nor Arai calls it.

Until recently, Southeast Asia was largely a cinematic no man's land. But in the last few years, the Rotterdam film festival started including the region in its program. Gradually, other film festivals followed suit. Last year, the Venice Festival screened Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz's magnum opus "Death in the Land of Encantos." This year's festival is showing even more digital productions from the Philippines - including the essay-film "Filipinos in High Definition" by John Torres - shortly before the Berlinale. And Berlin has hosted the first ever festival dedicated exclusively to young Asian film under the name "Asian Hot Shots" (see box).

Thai cinema was at the forefront of the digital trend with directors like Apichatpong Weerasethakul ("Mysterious Object at Noon," Cannes winner "Tropical Malady" and most recently "Syndromes and a Century"), Pen-Ek Ratanaruang ("Last Life in the Universe" and "Invisible Waves"). Now, the rest of the region is catching up.

Star directors like Apichatpong or Diaz, as well as up and coming talent like Tan Chui Mui from Malaysia or Raja Martin from the Philippines, have one thing in common: without digital cameras and without cheap editing programmes for the computer, they wouldn't have been able to make the films that secured their breakthroughs, working as they do in countries devoid of anything like a film subsidy.

Unlike the technical experiments of the European Dogma 95 filmmakers, who systematically exploited the visual flaws of digital video, these directors use the new medium pragmatically - as a substitute for traditional film, which most of them simply cannot afford. It allows them to take on subject matter neglected by commercial cinema makers in their home countries.

Often, they are stories from the dark underbelly of the societies in which they live. Like "Tribu" (Tribes), the debut film from Filipino director Jim Libiran, who was also a guest at the Berlinale. He shot the film in the Manila ghetto of Tondo, using amateur actors portraying scenes from their everyday lives as gang members and small-time crooks. The film is obviously a beginner's work, full of continuity mistakes and often inaudible sound or badly-lit scenes. But the amateur actors with their improvised style paint a different picture of the Philippines than the constant diet of love films, melodramas and comedies, fed to audiences by the local mainstream film industry.

Directors like Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal and Kidlat Tahimik found international acclaim with similar films in the 1970s and 1980s. But in the last two decades, Filipino cinema, once the world's third-largest film industry after Hollywood and Bollywood, has fallen into decline. It took the digitally produced "The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros" (2005) by Auraeus Solito - about a 12-year-old ghetto boy and his unrequited love for a policeman - to return to the kind of international festival success enjoyed by the Filipino New Wave of the 1970s. The film was also a surprise in the Philippines.

At the other end of the spectrum are films like Martin's "Indio Nacional" (2005), which has more in common with Latin American poetic realism than the socially aware cinema of Brocka, Bernal and others. Martin's black and white silent film, shot on digital video when he was only 22, has stylistic echoes of the early newsreels of Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers. His fellow director Khavn de la Cruz shoots no-budget trash films at a rate of almost one a month, in which the horror film tradition of Philippine cinema collides with international cult cinema. Unlike "Maximo Oliveros" and "Tribu," such films have no chance of regular distribution in the Philippines.

To overcome that hurdle, young filmmakers in the region are creating new ways to show their work: in schools, universities and galleries. In Manila, a group of independent filmmakers convinced the owner of a multiplex to devote one theater to regular screenings of local independent films. In Indonesia, the university city of Yogyakarta has developed a lively film scene that bypasses commercial cinema by setting up film clubs and microcinemas. Yogyakarta has earned a reputation in the region as one of the most interesting film cities in all of Southeast Asia.

Yet it is still often easier to see these films at festivals abroad than in their home countries. Amir's documentary "The Last Communist" was banned in Malaysia because it addresses the still problematic issue of the Communist Party of Malaysia. Although the main protagonist, Malaysian Communist leader Chin Peng, who has been living in exile in Thailand for more than 40 years, only appears once in the entire film, authorities decided the work was too controversial. The film has only been screened at festivals in Berlin, London, Singapore and Hong Kong, although it has become a bestseller on DVD on the Malaysian black market. In Singapore, and even in the comparatively liberal Philippines, independent filmmakers repeatedly clash with the still powerful censorship authorities.

Filmmakers like Torres, whose "Todo Todo Teros" (2006) won a slew of international film prizes, but was hardly shown at all in the Philippines, can always be found with a stack of DVDs in their backpack, which they distribute to anyone interested. Torres and Diaz occasionally even talk publicly about giving their films to DVD pirates, who do a roaring trade in Southeast Asia and appear to have access to an efficient distribution network.

- Tilman Baumgärtel teaches at the Film Institute of the College of Mass Communication at the University of the Philippines in Manila. He is editor of the recently published book: "Kino-Sine: Philippine-German Cinema Relations."

Asian hot shots in Berlin

A cop named Eros is investigating the case of five men who were burnt to death by a mob after somebody screamed 'thief' at them. A journalist named Janus is also covering the story. The two are quickly drawn into a labyrinth of mysteries and murders. Janus accidentally discovers a secret. But everyone he tells the secret to soon finds a terrible death. That is the kind of setting with which Indonesian filmmaker Joko Anwar won the audience prize at the 1st Asian Hot Shots Festival, which took place in Berlin from Jan. 16-22. Critics are giving Anwar's film "Dead Time/Kala" (right) rave revues, calling it the first Indonesian tribute to the film noir genre.

South Korean films took two prizes: Best Animation for "Legs" by Lee Hye-young and Best Short Film for Ryu Hyung-ki's "An Anonymous Man." A Dutch-Japanese co-production, "Diner With Murakami," directed by Hong Kong native Yan Ting Yuen, garnered the award for Best Documentary.

For one week, Asian Hot Shots showcased the vibrant Asian independent film scene. About 200 productions in the categories Short Film, Feature Film, Documentary and Animation were screened.
"I'm very happy about the fact that there is finally a meeting point and a platform for young Asian film in Germany," said actor and filmmaker Minh-Kai Phan-Thi, one of the festival's official patrons. Festivals like this one, said Phan-Thi, daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, "will help put an end to clichés and set aside prejudices."

This year's festival spotlighted the Philippines, from where the award-winning directors Kidlat Tahimik and Nick Deocampu came to Berlin in person for the event.

The 60th anniversary of the death of Mahatma Gandhi (see our article in the Politics section on page 5) was also market. The festival featured the German premiere of "Gandhi My Father," directed by Feroz Khan.

- AK