Tingin Southeast Asian Film Festival is returning from September 26 to 27 at Gateway Cineplex 18 to screen an exciting lineup of 10 Southeast Asian films.
The 8th edition of the festival carries the theme “Women’s Way of Seeing.” This year’s lineup includes movies that honor women’s stories from around the region.
One of the movies to be screened is Moral, the Filipino coming-of-age drama starring Gina Alajar, Lorna Tolentino, Anna Marin, and Sandy Andolong as a group of impressionable young women. It is directed by the late National Artist Marilou Diaz-Abaya and written by National Artist Ricky Lee.
The lineup also features Duong Dieu Linh’s fantasy-comedy Don’t Cry, Butterfly, in which a housewife turns to voodoo to lure her husband’s love back. The film won the Grand Prize and the award for Most Innovative Feature at the 2024 Venice Critics’ Week.
From Malaysia, the short film WAShhh follows a Chinese trainee at a National Service camp who is tasked with leading her female comrades in washing stained sanitary pads, which are thought to attract spirits. Directed by Mickey Lai, the short won the Pardino d’Oro for the Best International Short Film at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival.
In the Singaporean short film My Wonderful Life, working mother Grace Lee is hospitalized after collapsing at her workplace, forcing her to discover rest, release, and a doorway to freedom. Director Calleen Koh’s short won multiple awards, including Best Singapore Short Film at the 2024 Silver Screen Awards.
Monica Vanesa Tedja’s My Therapist Said, I Am Full of Sadness, a documentary-style short film from Indonesia, sees a young woman named Monica struggling to find a way to both live an authentically queer life in Berlin and find acceptance with her Christian-Indonesian parents. It was among the official selections at the 2024 Singapore International Film Festival.
From Laos, Mitpasa Sitthihukpanya’s The Blanket, centers on a woman struggling to keep her family together after her husband leaves in search of greener pastures.
Mycelium Memory, a short from Thailand, follows a Thai-American woman returning home, where personal and political histories intertwine through decay, memory, and renewal. The film is directed by Thai-American filmmaker Felicia Luna King.
In the Brunei action drama Akademi, directed by Siti Kamaluddin, a young woman sets her sights on becoming an elite security guard, entrusted to protect one of the country’s most rare treasures.
The Cambodian documentary Until the Orchids Bloom by Polen Ly focuses on the real-life story of Neang, an Indigenous mother fighting to keep her family and community together after a hydroelectric dam floods their ancestral land.
Rounding up the selection of the festival is The Maw Naing’s MA – Cry of Silence, a drama from Myanmar that follows a woman, haunted by past traumas, and how she is drawn into a garment workers’ strike when crisis forces her hand.
