S'pore-US short film wins in Brooklyn

S'pore-US short film wins in Brooklyn

A short film co-directed by a Singaporean and an American has won two awards at the Brooklyn Film Festival, which ended on Sunday.

The 19-minute work, In The Future Love Will Also, picked up a Best Experimental award as well as an Audience award in the Experimental category.

The film, by poet and multidisciplinary artist Alfie Lee, 46, and film-maker Clayton Allis, who is in his 40s, is a meditation on "identity and what happens when it is taken away," says Allis.

The collaboration began when he saw a series of photographs in which Lee had whited himself out of each image.

"They really affected me. Over the past decade, I have been working on a larger project about surveillance, which includes two earlier short films, and this seemed like the perfect way to close the trilogy," he says in an e-mail interview.

Lee is a Singaporean who moved to New York City in 2004. Allis, who is married to Singaporean Magdalene Sim, lives in New York but travels regularly to Singapore.

He plans to submit the film to the Singapore International Film Festival, which is expected to be held in November.

Lee adds that he and Allis have been developing an idea for a feature-length work set in New York and Singapore inspired by Lee's experience as a photographer capturing the music scene here.

They are keen to explore the "hopes and fears" of Singaporeans who "find themselves on the fringe", he says.


This article was first published on June 12, 2015.
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