3^rd Singapore Short Cuts (2006)0

About the 3^rd Singapore Short Cuts The annual Singapore Short Cuts event is one which cel­e­brates and encour­ages the growth of young Singaporean film­mak­ers. Every year, a hand­ful of short films are selected by The Substation to be show­cased at the National Museum under the fund­ing of the Singapore Film Commission. This year, more than a dozen were cho­sen and pre­sented in four sep­a­rate show­cases. (Please note that the 29 th July show­case could not be attended by both writ­ers and there­fore could not report on it. We apol­o­gize for the incon­ve­nience.) — 22^nd July Showcase – Hello?, directed by Gavin Lim – Old Woman, directed by Lau Chee Nien – Lost Sole, directed by Sanif Olek – 3Meals, directed by Woo Yen Yen & Colin Goh Not only is this show­case of shorts lack­ing in qual­ity, but they do not seem to pos­sess much under­stand­ing of the lan­guage of film­mak­ing as well. This is my first year at the Short Cuts event and its open­ing show­case has not left in me a valu­able impres­sion. Hello?, the first of the shorts, is basi­cally would I would describe as a self-conscious, mas­tur­ba­tory attempt to meld the visual flour­ishes of var­i­ous direc­tors such as Wong Kar-Wai, Kenneth Anger and exploita­tion cin­ema. It means some­thing that I feel that men­tion­ing these two direc­tors in the same breath as this film is a sin. A woman nar­rates in voice-over to us of how she does not wish to fall vic­tim to the mis­eries of love which had caused her own mother to com­mit sui­cide. She explains that there are three stages to love — lust, attrac­tion and attach­ment – and believes that if a cou­ple does not achieve the stage of attach­ment, they fall back into the stage of lust. So, she feels that there must be another stage to love: rejec­tion (as if that solves any­thing). Anyway, as this woman blab­bers on about her mus­ings on love, we see her mother in the 70s, an ex-air stew­ardess now work­ing as a tele­phone cleaner, as she charms a nerdish sec­re­tary who works in an office where she is occa­sion­ally called upon to clean their tele­phone. This leads to a well-done sequence, which reminds me of the theme of the sen­su­al­ity of and the affec­tion we have for machin­ery which runs through some of Kenneth Anger’s films such Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965). The scene con­sists of shots of her clean­ing the tele­phone inter-cut with shots of the sec­re­tary fan­ta­siz­ing of her touch­ing him affec­tion­ately. We then see the narrator’s mother dis­cover that the sec­re­tary is actu­ally attached, whereby she then pro­ceeds to tie him up to a bed and ham­mer the liv­ing hell out of him with a tele­phone in only her bra and panties. At the end of the film, we see the nar­ra­tor in present times doing exactly the same thing to another poor sap. You don’t get any more ‘stu­dent film’ than that. The story is very much a visual piece, and it is in this area where the direc­tor dis­plays his tal­ents. But it is always sad­den­ing to see a film where it is evi­dent that the cre­ators have not put in enough thought, or per­haps didn’t even care about hav­ing a good story. The direc­tor is more con­cerned with exploit­ing his own visual exper­tise rather than devel­op­ing a story that, while gen­er­ally juve­nile, is not with­out intel­li­gence. There is an open­ing line in the film that is intrigu­ing, inform­ing us of how tele­phones affect our feel­ings of lone­li­ness. Perhaps the tele­phone is a metaphor for that in this film, but the direc­tor seems to have for­got­ten about what he had wanted to say and hid it six feet under a pile of cel­lu­loid. The sec­ond short, named Old Woman, is about an elderly woman who decides to kill her­self after the death of her son. At the start of the film, we see this woman tie a makeshift noose in her kitchen, ready to hang her­self. But then sud­denly she hears a child cry­ing out­side her door. She finds an aban­doned baby on her doorstep, takes the child into her home and cares for it. As she devel­ops an attach­ment to the baby, she begins to rem­i­nisce about the past, when her son was alive and she was happy. The pres­ence of this child intro­duces a change in her as she now has a sense of pur­pose and direc­tion in her life. Within a mat­ter of weeks, the mother of the aban­doned child, an igno­rant reluc­tant par­ent, comes to reclaim her child. With the child no longer around, the old woman resumes her daily life, but with a renewed belief in the con­tin­u­ance of life in spite of neg­a­tive cir­cum­stances. The director’s the­sis film, Grandfather, won awards at the 2 nd Singapore Shorts Festival and the 8 th Pyongyang Film Festival. I have not yet seen Grandfather, but in light of this film, his acclaim comes as a sur­prise to me. It is pos­si­ble that the com­pas­sion he shows for the elderly helped him win the awards he did. The direc­tor, who was present at the screen­ing of this film along with his lead actress and the rest of the show­cased direc­tors, has expressed a fond­ness for char­ac­ters that dwell in the fringes of soci­ety. But, in con­text of this short, his ide­al­ized image of the elderly both­ers me. I doubt his under­stand­ing of the nature of this micro­cosm, him being a young man with so much ahead of him. The film is lack­lus­ter and ama­teur­ish, weak in its char­ac­ter­i­za­tions and lack­ing in con­fi­dent direc­tion. Lau did noth­ing to develop the char­ac­ter. What the audi­ence was doing the entire time was observ­ing the old woman as she went about her rou­tine. It does not tell us some­thing new about this elderly woman, nor does it accom­plish the fun­da­men­tal inten­tion of a nar­ra­tive which is to con­nect to the audi­ence. Not only was the story inef­fec­tive, it also did not dis­play any styl­is­tic pre­med­i­ta­tion. For exam­ple the scene in the kitchen, where the old woman was try­ing to tie a noose, or when she was at her table prepar­ing a drink. It felt like Lau had placed his cam­era­man on the floor because they didn’t have space to do oth­er­wise and shoot in angles he thought would appear inter­est­ing. It was, I feel, a shal­low attempt at the theme of the renewal of hope in a life that no longer seems worth liv­ing. The direc­tor was fool­ish in his belief that the use of a poten­tially mov­ing sub­ject mat­ter would be able to cap­ti­vate his audience’s hearts. The film has the feel of a TV drama, doomed to belong on shelves of film schools for the sole pur­pose of edu­cat­ing film stu­dents on what not to do when given some video­tape and a cam­era. Lost Sole, the third short in the show­case, is a comedic social com­men­tary about an old Muslim man who, after a prayer ses­sion the mosque, has lost his pair of slip­pers. The loss of these slip­pers trig­gers off a set of events that humil­i­ate him, as well as make appar­ent the increas­ing gap between the rapidly-evolving world and the gen­er­a­tion that has been left behind. In a short that would have worked bet­ter with sub­tle nuances, the direc­tor has opted for the clut­tered overuse of dia­logue, dam­ag­ing any poten­tial the film had in mak­ing any emo­tional impact. The result is a con­trived and painfully obvi­ous film which had char­ac­ters talk­ing aloud to them­selves rather than rely on power of sub­tlety or great act­ing. The film also has the gall to actu­ally think that its flat low-brow jokes are funny. An instance would be where a men­tally chal­lenged youth hold­ing a tin can for col­lect­ing flags with con­fronts the main char­ac­ter, ask­ing the old man if he remem­bers hav­ing taught him in the past. The old man replies with great irri­ta­tion that he does not want to donate any money to the orga­ni­za­tion. It is later revealed to us that he had for­got­ten to bring his hear­ing aid. It is also a self­ish film, giv­ing the audi­ence nei­ther sub­tle ambi­gu­i­ties to pon­der on nor enter­tain­ment. The last of the shorts, 3Meals, is pro­duced by the mak­ers of Talking Cock The Movie and the upcom­ing Singapore Dreaming. The pro­duc­ers of these three films spe­cial­ize in the low-brow ah beng/ah hui/ah lian type of come­dies, which do not cater to my lik­ing. Thus it is not with­out sur­prise that this short turned out to be, in my opin­ion, the best of the lot. Why? Because it works. I did not find much of the film very funny, but many of the audi­ence mem­bers who were at the screen­ing dis­agreed. They were howl­ing with laugh­ter and it was a joy to see this film reach its audi­ence the way it did. The story is sim­ple, but effec­tive. A woman shares three of her home-cooked meals with two of her boyfriends and her mother in the three dif­fer­ent seg­ments of the film. The first boyfriend is a shrewd Asian busi­ness­man, while the sec­ond is a rude and crude Caucasian for­eigner. Both of her boyfriends are self­ish, demand­ing and picky with their food. Most of the humor in these seg­ments con­sists of dis­play­ing the char­ac­ters’ comedic man­ner­isms and their shar­ing of uncom­fort­able silences when the boyfriends have trou­ble express­ing their opin­ions on her food. The film ends with the woman and her mother griev­ing through song over how the men in their life tire them with their food demands. The use of food as a metaphor for com­mu­ni­ca­tion has been employed in many Singaporean films, yet strangely it does not seem to have become tired or con­trived. Perhaps it is because it is very Singaporean in essence, or per­haps it is to the credit to the film­mak­ers to have pre­sented this for­mula in a fresh new way. An inter­est­ing styl­is­tic choice the direc­tor has made was to shoot the film in the style of Jim Jarmusch with its use of sta­tic cam­era shots depict­ing char­ac­ters in con­ver­sa­tion. Though I’m not a huge fan of this film, I have to say I’m gen­uinely inter­ested in what else these film­mak­ers can come up with in the future. — 5^th August Showcase – Absence, directed by K. Rajagopal – Datura, directed by Abdul Nizam Khan – Ragged, directed by Nisar and Nazir Husain Keshvani – A Sense of Home, directed by Lim Suat Yen This week’s show­case focuses on a selec­tion of short films that were made in the 90s. It can be seen through this show­case that the state of Singaporean short film­mak­ing has both improved and wors­ened over the years. Though we have cul­ti­vated a greater sense of tech­no­log­i­cal finesse, the more sub­stan­tial aspects of film­mak­ing, like sto­ry­telling, have taken a toll. Absence, the first of the lot, is about a mother and son’s attempt to cope with the loss of her husband/his father. Even though it has been quite a while since the man has passed on, the mother con­tin­ues to mourn for him. The son, how­ever, prefers not to be reminded of it because he likes to think that his mother and he have moved on with their lives. We get an idea that his father was not much of a good man. On the day of the death anniver­sary, the mother piti­fully begs for her son to join her at the anniver­sary rit­ual. Seeing how impor­tant it is to her, he com­plies. He leaves for work and we fol­low him as he goes about his work (he’s an artist), scout­ing the streets for a muse with his cam­era. He finds one in the navel of a woman, “You have a beau­ti­ful navel… Can I pho­to­graph you?” he asks. She can­didly invites him to her home where he pho­tographs her swim­ming in her pool; but he does not join her because he’s afraid of water. Things get hot between the two and he nearly lands her when he remem­bers hav­ing to be at the rit­ual. He rushes to the scene, only to find his despon­dent mother pack­ing up after the prayers and the priest med­i­tat­ing in the mid­dle of the sea. The serene image of the priest med­i­tat­ing entrances him. He decides that he will draw a por­trait of the priest and over the next few days, his inter­ac­tion with the man lead­ing to the com­ple­tion of his work, prov­ing to be a cat­a­lyst for the son’s cathar­sis: it jump­starts a chain of events which cause the son to con­front emo­tions he had sup­pressed. Though the script is dread­fully con­trived, this film pos­sesses more poten­tial than most of the films I’ve seen at this year’s Short Cuts. The direc­tor was con­sci­en­tious enough to sculpt a cer­tain amount of depth into his main char­ac­ter and this is some­thing that is lack­ing in most of the short films that graced the fes­ti­val. There is a scene in the film where the priest is show­er­ing in an open space which I though was quite well-shot. The way the scene was lit caused the cas­cad­ing water to look like the priest was sur­rounded with a kind of celes­tial lumi­nance – mir­ror­ing that of the son’s paint­ing of the priest. It brings back a mem­ory from his child­hood where his father aggres­sively forces him to take a shower with him, explain­ing the rea­son behind his pho­bia for water. We learn from this that the son expe­ri­enced sex­ual abuse of some sort, explain­ing his sex­ual assertive­ness. But the film is not with­out its flaws. This film is about estrange­ment, and it lacks the emo­tional ten­sion that comes with such a sub­ject mat­ter. The film also lacks focus, often veer­ing towards the mother. Had Rajagopal stayed focused on the char­ac­ter of the son, it would have made a tighter pic­ture and a bet­ter story. The mother’s char­ac­ter only served to cre­ate loop­holes in the story that a short film would not be able to give the time to cover. This caused a sense of pas­sive­ness within the film that dis­tracts from the theme and makes it unin­ter­est­ing to watch. Just when the short got mean­ing­ful, most of us had already given up on the story. Another prob­lem was the ter­ri­bly unsat­is­fy­ing end­ing – that being the son walk­ing in on his mother and the priest, undressed and asleep in each other’s arms, hav­ing for­saken their social respon­si­bil­i­ties and suc­cumbed to their human needs. It explains the mother’s con­stant need to mourn for her hus­band that it had, in fact, been out of guilt rather than sen­ti­ment. But I don’t care to know that because the end­ing had already left me annoyed and empty by tak­ing away every like­able char­ac­ter in the film and turn­ing them into silly, self­ish, sex-driven indi­vid­u­als. Datura, the sec­ond short, is a dream sequence from which the main char­ac­ter awakes from at the end of the film. The story is as so: The main char­ac­ter seeks out a bomoh – Malay for witch doc­tor – for a potion that would kill who­ever who drinks of it. He organ­ises a party and spikes the drinks with the potion. Everyone at the party dies. The main char­ac­ter walks out the room and is then awoken by a woman who calls for him to wake up. The theme of the film is the explo­ration of the illu­sion of real­ity. I would say this was the best of the four screened that day because it is the only one that felt com­plete. It was a con­cise 2-act that didn’t try to accom­plish more than it should. Although it went a lit­tle over­board with the blurry visual effects and the con­stant chant­ing in the back­ground to cre­ate that hal­lu­ci­na­tory effect, I thought it served its pur­pose. The third short, Ragged, draws from the direc­tors’ vivid mem­ory that as kids, they were threat­ened by their mother of the rag-and-bone man whom she would call to take them away had they mis­be­haved. In their adult­hood, they wanted to human­ise the image of the rag-and-bone man and thus came up with this film. The rag-and-bone man in the story goes around from house to house col­lect­ing people’s old or unwanted items. The man is a sorry sight in his straw hat and tat­tered clothes, and is regarded like a freak by chil­dren who cower behind their moth­ers when he comes in their way. For a man who sur­rounds him­self in so much of the old, it is only nat­ural that he is one who can­not let go. Most of the story con­sists of footage of the man walk­ing around aim­lessly and color footage of his wed­ding and his daugh­ter. Ragged was shot on black-and-white dig­i­tal video, but flash­back sequences were in color, clearly demon­strat­ing that his present life is a monot­o­nous shadow of its past. It was unfor­tu­nate that tech­nol­ogy is con­stantly advanc­ing and that of the past is fast becom­ing obso­lete. Ragged had gone through a poor trans­fer, caus­ing the images to look pix­i­lated and com­pro­mis­ing the expe­ri­ence of watch­ing the film. But that wasn’t the prob­lem. The prob­lem was that there wasn’t much of a story to begin with. It was bor­ing, the pace was too slow and dia­logue was also badly scripted. I felt absolutely worn out at the end of the ordeal of watch­ing this short. It was as though I had walked with him as he trudged up, down the grass patches and under the void decks with his wares. But I have to com­mend the direc­tors for their pas­sion for film that it did not mat­ter that it was really heavy and bulky cam­era equip­ment they were using as long as they could cre­ate sto­ries they wanted to cre­ate. The last short, A Sense of Home, star­ring the direc­tor her­self as the main char­ac­ter, is about a young female who returns to Singapore after spend­ing a cou­ple of years abroad. She meets a child­hood friend of hers whom she laments to about the inevitable changes Singapore had gone through which have left her feel­ing empty and frus­trated. They go to one of their child­hood play­ing grounds where the main char­ac­ter tries to per­suade her friend into climb­ing a hill with her – as kids, they swore to do in adult­hood. To the dis­ap­point­ment of the main char­ac­ter, her friend declines, think­ing it is too dan­ger­ous. This leaves her feel­ing even more alone since even her best friend has changed in her mind­set and is unable to keep to promises they had made. Thus rein­forc­ing that ele­ment of change she has been engulfed by. Well, she moves about the local land­scape that was, at the time, cur­rently in con­struc­tion. At the end of the film, she comes to terms with her sense of self and embraces her fam­ily. The mak­ings of this film are so sick­en­ingly patri­otic that it should be used by the gov­ern­ment as a National Day enter­tain­ment. — 11^th August Showcase – Aik Khoon, directed by Chen Bang Jun – Untitled, directed by Loo Zihan and Kan Lume – Pontianak, directed by Raihan Harun – No Day Off, directed by Eric Khoo This final show­case of 2006’s Short Cuts event fares bet­ter in com­par­i­son to its pre­ced­ing show­cases, though not much. Aik Khoon and Pontianak are of depress­ingly mid­dling qual­ity, Untitled a mere curios­ity (due to my hav­ing seen co-director Kan Lume’s impres­sive fea­ture film, The Art of Flirting), with only Eric Khoo’s No Day Off to brighten the spir­its. The story of Aik Khoon is not one worth men­tion­ing, but due to my respon­si­bil­i­ties, I will any­way. It is the story of two middle-aged men, one of which is a taxi dri­ver named Aik Khoon, the other being a job­less man (whose name I can­not remem­ber) who spends his time tag­ging along with Aik Khoon, rem­i­nisc­ing about their school days and think­ing up get-rich-quick schemes. They then meet the job­less man’s son by acci­dent dur­ing one of Aik Khoon’s taxi fares, where we dis­cover that the job­less man is estranged from his fam­ily. Later, through some unex­plained occur­rence, Aik Khoon finds that his friend has died. The entire struc­ture of the piece is a mess. It begins as an unfunny com­edy for the first third of the movie or so that con­sists of the two of them rat­ing women and think­ing of ways to tell if a woman is a vir­gin, etc., then dra­mat­i­cally shifts into dra­matic ter­ri­tory where details are star­tlingly ambigu­ous (argu­ments hap­pen out of the blue, a char­ac­ter dies all of a sud­den). The film is dis­hon­est and insin­cere, not only about the character’s emo­tions, but also about his inten­tions of the film. It is a badly-made film. The sec­ond film, Untitled, is co-directed by Kan Lume, whose Art of Flirting was an impres­sive med­i­ta­tion on the hon­esty (and dis­hon­esty) of male-female rela­tion­ships and the cru­el­ties inflicted upon var­i­ous par­ties. Having seen his fea­ture film (which I assume was made after this), I approached this short film with antic­i­pa­tion and curios­ity. Unsurprisingly (con­sid­er­ing the qual­ity of the event thus far), the film was a dis­ap­point­ment. The film basi­cally lets us wit­ness the life of a male gigolo through a lim­ited time­frame of a few hours. He waits on a cor­ner, gets picked up by unre­vealed male cus­tomer, serves him in a motel room and gets left there. He then goes through a clean­ing rit­ual where he brushes his teeth and has a shower. He then goes home and repeats his clean­ing rit­ual except this time he cleans him­self vig­or­ously, even­tu­ally break­ing down in tears. The film was made as part of a guerilla film­mak­ing com­pe­ti­tion and was con­ceived, shot and edited within a mere 36 hours. Sadly, its hur­ried process of pro­duc­tion shows in the film. It has lit­tle in the way of an actual story or inven­tive cam­er­a­work. But, con­sid­er­ing the con­di­tions of the pro­duc­tion of the film, the film at least has the abil­ity to affect us emo­tion­ally, a rar­ity through­out this year’s event. Also, the straight-forward cin­e­matog­ra­phy actu­ally helps to enhance the real­ity that the film­mak­ers were reach­ing for. Plus, the film is effec­tive in its brief­ness, empha­siz­ing the film’s inten­tion of pro­vid­ing the audi­ence all it needs to know about the char­ac­ter and how his occu­pa­tion affects his emo­tional state. But the actor who plays the pros­ti­tute does not pos­sess the dra­matic range to bring out the emo­tional aspects required in the per­for­mance (though he has some nice moments of impro­vi­sa­tion), thus fal­ter­ing the real­ism of the feel of the film. Also, there is an unshak­able aura of eager artis­tic pre­tense and yet also a lack of con­fi­dent direc­tion – telling signs of the young and inex­pe­ri­enced. Though poten­tial is evi­dent, the film­mak­ers haven’t made me, as an audi­ence mem­ber, feel that sit­ting through their film has been worth my time. Pontianak is a badly-made, generic hor­ror story about pos­ses­sion. The pro­gram guide for the Short Cuts event reads: “Pontianak is a hor­ror story about a reformed adul­terer, Kharis, bat­tling his dead wife to main­tain cus­tody of their child. In this fight, he bat­tles his own dis­be­lief and races against time to stop his lit­tle girl’s trans­for­ma­tion into her mother’s ilk. In a story where parental right takes on a meta­phys­i­cal level, the dilemma of right and wrong becomes as blurred as life and death.” Yeah, right. While every­thing that is entailed in this syn­op­sis does occur in the film, every detail is hur­ried to the point of inex­plic­a­bil­ity. The story of the film has been well-treaded on in a thou­sand other hor­ror films and the only thing that sets this apart from them is that it tries to accom­plish it in 15 min­utes. Good for us since we wouldn’t have to endure another hour’s worth of mumbo-jumbo than we’re used to. The actor who plays the black magic man con­sulted by the hus­band does have a great, creepy face though. Finally, the last film of the 2006 Short Cuts event: Eric Khoo’s No Day Off. The direc­tor is widely known as the man who single-handedly revi­tal­ized inter­est in film­mak­ing in Singapore with his widely-acclaimed fea­ture films (Mee Pok Man, 12 Storeys & Be With Me). However, I feel that this short film sur­passes even those fea­ture films (though I’m not a fan of Be With Me myself). Khoo has shown him­self to become an increas­ingly mature and con­fi­dent film­maker, both in terms of the themes he tack­les and the sto­ry­telling tech­niques he employs. It sets itself apart from his other films. The story of the film is about a maid, span­ning from when she is in her vil­lage in Indonesia, where she has a hus­band and young child, to when she goes to Singapore to work, where she is passed from one owner to the next (a total of three), to when she returns Indonesia, to a home that she has been work­ing so hard for, which turns out to be a con­crete hut and not the good home her rel­a­tives have told her it would be. The ironic end­ing is a cre­ative deci­sion of the kind Khoo has fre­quently attempted but finally mas­tered (the upstand­ing teacher in 12 Storeys ends up being arrested for drunken dis­or­der when he is at his most vul­ner­a­ble; the rotund secu­rity guard’s infat­u­a­tion with a busi­ness­woman is doomed from the start and we know it – Khoo kills him off through a freak coin­ci­dence (the teenage les­bian attempts sui­cide in despair but falls on him, killing him instead) when he is about to make a move in start­ing a rela­tion­ship with his idol). Each of the fam­i­lies she works for are of three dif­fer­ent eco­nomic and social back­grounds. The first fam­ily she encoun­ters is a wealthy fam­ily, edu­cated in the Queen’s English, that is inca­pable of under­stand­ing her lack of com­pre­hen­sion of the English lan­guage and blames her for her mis­takes when they do not bother to teach her how to go about her house­hold duties. The maid’s employ­ment under this fam­ily ends when they decide to migrate, return­ing her to the maid agency. The sec­ond fam­ily she comes to work for is a middle-class fam­ily of Cantonese ori­gins who are prej­u­diced against her race and crit­i­cizes her with no end, the worse of the lot being the elderly grandma (hmm… remem­ber 12 Storeys?). The last fam­ily she works for is an Indian fam­ily of two, of which they have no com­mu­ni­ca­tion bar­rier as they all know the Malay lan­guage. Also, in this house­hold, she does not suf­fer the abuse that has been laid down upon her from the two pre­vi­ous fam­i­lies and actu­ally gets along quite well with the both of them, which are a sickly father and a daugh­ter that cares for him. The visual strat­egy of the film is actu­ally quite bril­liant in that the fram­ing of the shots are always focused on the maid and her employ­ers are never in frame. It’s as if the direc­tor wants us to reflect on what the employ­ers say, how they treat her, mak­ing us ask our­selves if we’ve treated our own maids that way too. But I real­ized that as I watched the film, I did not feel as if a fin­ger was being pointed at me, but rather that the film­mak­ers sim­ply wanted me to know that this is what a maid in Singapore has to go through. The film isn’t a mes­sage movie, though it could have been one. The film is under­stated and has a very real­is­tic feel to it, and as a result, some may actu­ally feel like it is try­ing to impose a mes­sage on us. But it was not, rather plainly just try­ing to depict a cer­tain sit­u­a­tion with a begin­ning, a pas­sage of expe­ri­ence, and its final out­come. It is sur­pris­ing that the char­ac­ter is not depicted as a vic­tim of cir­cum­stances, but more like a sur­vivor of the ordeals she has to go through so that her fam­ily can live bet­ter. The film does not want to remind us of how we can be so insen­si­tive to maids, but rather that maids are human beings with their own lives and that we should be sen­si­tive to that. Written by: Athalia Ho & Lim Lung Chieh