Local lustre at Silver Screen Awards

VIVEK GOMBER, 35

Vivek Gomber (below) was born in Jaipur, Rajasthan, nicknamed the Pink City for the lovely hue it is awash in. He was transplanted to Singapore at around age 10, when his late father came here to work in the finance industry. Gomber went on to do national service and ended up with more pink in his life - the Singapore citizen's identity card.

Now based in Mumbai on a work visa, he tells Life! that winning at the Silver Screen Awards was "pretty unexpected and quite emotional". It must have been particularly satisfying to triumph here, for as he puts it: "I love both India and Singapore. For me, they're both home."

He was speaking over the telephone from Dubai, where Court is taking part in the Dubai International Film Festival. The movie is about a folk singer who is tried in court for inciting a manhole worker to commit suicide with his inflammatory song. Gomber plays the lawyer defending him.

The actor first met writer-director Chaitanya Tamhane when they worked together on a magic-themed play, Grey Elephants In Denmark (2009). They became friends and Court evolved in an "organic" way after Tamhane came up with a script about the Indian legal system.

To get the project off the ground, Gomber decided to step up as producer. He says it was a big challenge "getting people to believe in a first-time, 24-year-old director who has never made a feature and a first-time producer whose background is completely in theatre".

He has also done "small parts here and there" in Bollywood films and on Indian television.

Finding funding was tough as well, though getting about €10,000 (S$16,000) from the International Film Festival Rotterdam's prestigious Hubert Bals Fund last year helped to open some doors. Still, Gomber says he had to plough in "quite a bit" of his savings for the "low-budget" film.

He says: "I was frustrated because not a lot of interesting work was happening or coming my way. I was also frustrated with complaining and I just wanted to create my own work and collaborate with people I want to collaborate with."

While the film seems to be an expose of Indian judicial workings, he points out that it is not simply about exposing the system's flaws. He notes: "It's more of a case study of humanity, trying to understand where somebody's coming from. I don't think anybody's at fault here."

For legal expertise to ensure the film's authenticity, he turned to his mother, Meena V. Gomber, 63, a retired High Court judge in India. But he was nervous about letting her see the entire screenplay and she watched the movie only when it was completed. "She surprisingly agreed with a lot of it and said she could see that frustration in her 35 years in the judiciary."

Earning his producer stripes could come in handy for him. He says: "I would love to focus only on acting, but if need be, this has given me the confidence that I can rely on my instinct, that I can find something to fall back on in terms of creating work for myself."

The only child adds: "My being single hurts my mum a lot. Even though they have been supportive, I think my parents had secretly been hoping that at some point, I would quit acting." His father died in 2010 from bone marrow cancer.

The actor-producer says: "But now, mum just wants me to get married."

The recent Singapore International Film Festival was notable for not only its strong showing of local content but also the contingent of Singaporeans with winning works at the Silver Screen Awards on Dec 13.

Kirsten Tan's Dahdi (Granny) won Best South-east Asian Short Film, Shijie Tan's Not Working Today won Best Singapore Short Film and Court, which Vivek Gomber produced and starred in, won Best Film and Best Director for India's Chaitanya Tamhane.

KIRSTEN TAN, 33

Having spent the last eight years away from home, Kirsten Tan knew she wanted her graduation short film to be set in Singapore. She had been pursuing her master's in film production at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and graduated in September.

The resulting work is no rose-tinted, nostalgic view of home.

In Dahdi (Granny), an elderly widow living on Pulau Ubin unexpectedly comes across a young asylum-seeking girl. It was inspired by real-life events which took place in December 2012. Then, a group of Burmese Rohingya refugees had arrived in Singapore, but were eventually turned away.

Around that time, reports of Singapore doing well economically were released. Tan recalls: "The juxtaposition of the news really got to me. Surely, for such a rich and well-off country, we could have room for compassion. Basically, it's a conflict between moral and legal responsibilities: What is the right thing to do in this situation?"

When casting for the film, she scoured Singapore for Rohingya Burmese and found only 10 - none the age she needed. She then searched for someone who could pass for that ethnicity, only to realise: "A lot of Singaporean kids look rather well-fed so it's hard to pass them off as refugees."

She eventually found her actress - Siti Nurul Huda M. Azahary, 11 - after visiting six to eight primary schools and checking out Peninsula Plaza.

Dahdi was named Best South-east Asian Short Film at the Silver Screen Awards. Tan has been named Best Director at the Singapore International Film Festival in 2007 for Fonzi, about a character who realises she is not real. In 2006, her short film about causality, 10 Minutes Later, won silver at the Czech Republic's Brno Sixteen film festival.

After graduating from Ngee Ann Polytechnic with an advanced diploma in film production in 2005, Tan, who is single, spent a year in South Korea on the Jeonbuk Independent Film Association's residency programme. Her parents are in the finance industry, while her elder brother works in the airline industry.

Around 2008, she spent 11/2 years in Thailand, where she helped run a market stall, formed a rock band and visited film sets: "I was travelling so much that even a Thai fortune teller told me 'the gods are confused about where you sleep'.

"It's too straightforward if you just study film and become a film-maker," she adds.

Up next is her set-in-Thailand feature debut Popeye ("an existential road movie with an elephant", she calls it), which will be produced by acclaimed director Anthony Chen's Giraffe Pictures. It won TorinoFilmLab's top production prize of €60,000 (S$96,900). The jury also hailed it for its humanity and humour. "Even though I do films across different genres," Tan says, "these are the two elements that I hope my films will always have."

SHIJIE TAN, 33

The morning after the Little India riot on Dec 8 last year, Shijie Tan (below) handed in his thesis film for his master's degree in film production at Tisch School of the Arts Asia, the Singapore arm of the New York University film school.

Titled Not Working Today, it is about a Bangladeshi worker who makes his way to the labour authorities to seek redress for wages owed to him.

The soft-spoken Tan tells Life!: "It felt a little prophetic, although obviously not in a good way. When the riots happened, I was shocked at the violence, but I wasn't surprised. And that's when I felt it was the right thing to make the film."

While searching for a topic for his project, he came across the plight of migrant workers in some articles. He decided to volunteer with non-government organisation Transient Workers Count Too to learn more about the issue.

He realised he wanted to make a film about them because, as he puts it: "To my knowledge, these men are not really represented on screen."

He found his leading man by chance. Dibashram, a gathering space in Little India for foreign workers, has a drama troupe which puts on plays about the workers' experiences in Singapore. Abu Ahasan, 29, performed in one of them and caught Tan's eye. He had come to Singapore from Bangladesh to work as a painter, but had been out of work "for a long time" after suffering an injury and had medical claims that were not settled.

Tan notes: "There is an added level of realism when the actor you cast has gone through these experiences. The character's name is Apu Ahasan, as close to the actor's name as possible, and that helped the performance."

Not Working Today is only his third short film, but he is no stranger to accolades.

Er Ren (For Two) (2009), about two people who deny each other's existence although they live in the same house, competed at the Venice Film Festival. The Hole (2012), about a widow and her unmarried son, picked up prizes for Best Director, Best Fiction, Best Script and Best Sound at the Singapore Short Film Awards.

Tan came to film-making late after majoring in philosophy at the National University of Singapore and graduating in 2006. He was trying to figure out what he wanted to do. When Tisch Asia opened its doors here, he decided to give it a shot and enrolled in 2008 after getting a scholarship from the Media Development Authority.

He had always been interested in cinema. Directors he respects include France's Claire Denis, Taiwan's Edward Yang and Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne - "film-makers with a point of view".

His father, who is a retired shipyard manager, and mother, who works in an administrative job, gave him their blessing. He has a younger sister who recently graduated from university in Canada.

Up next for the bachelor is a highly visible project. He is one of three directors contributing to an omnibus project under award-winning director Anthony Chen's new outfit, Giraffe Pictures. Taiwanese actor Chen Bo-lin stars in all three segments and Tan's will tackle the topic of friendship.

He says: "I've never worked with a star before. But I realised he's an actor, I'm a director, we're making a film together and it feels natural."

Tan has an idea of the kind of movies he wants to make. "Film is primarily an emotional medium and I understand that very much, but I think it's very special when you can both move the audience and get them to think."

This article was first published on December 20, 2014.
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