Mia, an ex-prostitute, is trapped in a loveless marriage with the abusive Quan (Sunny Pang, who also stars in Headshot in this year’s Festival lineup), a butcher who runs a roast meat shop. When she meets sensitive funeral director Wu, their passion for one another escalates into an affair. But the path to true love is fraught with jealousy, forcing someone to make a deadly move.
Two playboys try to forget previous romances in Singapore – until they meet a beautiful dancer.
In 1960s Hong Kong, two neighbors form an intimate bond after making a discovery about their spouses in this visually stunning tale of unrequited love.
After a woman shoots a man to death, a damning letter she wrote raises suspicions.
50-year-old Jim (Gerald Chew, "Apprentice", Cannes Film Festival 2016 Un Certain Regard) loses his high-flying job in status-conscious Singapore, but his ego and pride compel him to hide this from his wife (Amy J Cheng, "Crazy Rich Asians") and daughter. His only confidante is his best friend (Sivakumar Palakrishnan, "A Yellow Bird", Cannes Film Festival 2016 Critics' Week). Desperately clinging onto the material symbols of his past success, he unlocks a hibernating malevolent force, with sinister roots in long-buried secrets. As his dream life crumbles around him, worlds collide, the lines between then and now become increasingly blurred, and Jim descends into a waking nightmare. REPOSSESSION is a bold, genre-bending film, with an ever-evolving, haunting soundscape from Golden Horse Award-winning composer Teo Wei Yong ("A Land Imagined").
A fallen woman seeks redemption at a Singapore rubber plantation. Melodrama.
Two Singaporean girls join together to form the Papaya Sisters, a getai group that sings at performances during the seventh lunar month. Big Papaya is estranged from her mother, who disapproves of her performances, whilst Little Papaya is an orphan who suffers from terminal cancer. The two are assisted by Auntie Ling and her son, Guan Yin. The two soon rise to the top of the Singaporean getai scene singing traditional Hokkien songs, but their fame brings along with it the enmity of the Durian Sisters, a rival group of techno-singing Eurasian girls.
5 years old Yang spends an afternoon with his mother on a shopping trip. When he throws a tantrum after feeling neglected, she decides to punish him by walking away. A seemingly harmless punishment eventually becomes a pivotal childhood experience for Yang that will forever change him.
After a family patriarch's passing, mother and son set off on different paths to cope with the loss. While the mother finds solace in religion and prayers, the son expresses himself through art. Unbeknownst to them, they are set on a collision course with one another, with life-altering consequences.
After the war, Matt Gordon returns to Singapore to retrieve a fortune in smuggled pearls. Arrived, he reminisces in flashback about his prewar fiancée, alluring Linda, and her disappearance during the Japanese attack. But now Linda resurfaces...with amnesia and married to rich planter Van Leyden. Meanwhile, sinister fence Mauribus schemes to get Matt's pearls.
Jack Flowers is an American hustler trying to make his fortune in 1970s Singapore in small time pimping. His dreams of building a fortune by running a brothel himself and returning to the States is materialized when he is offered the opportunity by the CIA to run a brothel for the R&R activities of U.S. soldiers on leave in Singapore.
A group of English, American, Dutch and Australian women creates a vocal orchestra while being imprisoned in a Japanese POW camp on Sumatra during World War II.
Tam, a diligent wedding venue staffer, discovers her husband’s affair on live TV. Rather than confronting him, she enlists a powerful spell master to win back his love. Tam’s daughter, Ha, pours her frustration into vivid fantasies of a brighter future abroad. Meanwhile, a mysterious House Spirit, visible only to the women, lurks beneath their cracked, leaky ceiling.
An aspiring filmmaker, who is also down on luck, goes to Singapore to meet a producer, but what follows is misadventure after misadventure, with a dash of romance thrown in.
A 2006 Singaporean film and the sequel to the 2002 film, I Not Stupid. A satirical comedy, I Not Stupid Too portrays the lives, struggles and adventures of three Singaporean youths - 15-year-old Tom, his 8-year-old brother Jerry and their 15-year-old friend Chengcai - who have a strained relationship with their parents. The film explores the issue of poor parent-child communication.
En is an 18-year-old who has lost his father to cancer. As his family is drawn together in a sudden tragedy, he has to decide what he believes in. But in a country where ideologies are forged on constantly shifting sands, he struggles to stay true to what he knows to be right. And in a family that prefers to forget, the sandcastles of all he holds dear seem doomed to be washed away by the tides of time.
Disappointed by his failed dreams, Loh Poh Huat visits his frustrations on his family. So when he wins the lottery, everyone believes the money will deliver them from their struggles. However, Loh dies abruptly and his elaborate and surreal Taoist funeral pitches the family into a battle where the stakes are the very meaning of life itself. Singapore Dreaming is a poignant yet darkly humorous story which follows the lives of six individuals as they navigate the rapidly changing conditions experienced in today’s modern South-East Asian cities.
The film begins in 1780 and follows the footsteps of the poet Julius Schönfeld based on his fragmentary diary. The film tells the story of his life at a princely court in Germany in episodic form. One celebration follows another. But the prince's carefree everyday life takes a bitter turn: his cook dies. On her deathbed, however, she asks him to take care of her two children after her death. The prince promises to fulfill her request, probably only because she was his favorite cook. Thus, life changes abruptly for Julius and his sister.
An American-born Chinese economics professor accompanies her boyfriend to Singapore for his best friend's wedding, only to get thrust into the lives of Asia's rich and famous.
Three tales of love wrap around the true story of a blind and deaf woman named Theresa Chan. In the first an elderly shopkeeper is devoted to his sick wife. In the second, two teenage girls become soul mates and lovers. In the third a chubby security guard tries to find the courage to woo a beautiful woman who works in his building.