Make a date with your memories this Sunday 8 August, 10 pm on OKTO!

This Sunday, 8th August 2010, a new documentary film will be screened at 10pm on Okto.


Do you know, do you remember where this dragon is?

Okto's Special National Day Documentary Feature OLD PLACES – with support from NHB’s Heritage Industry Incentive Programme (Hi2P) - is produced by Chuan Pictures, directed by Royston Tan, Victric Thng and Eva Tang, and features the voices of Singaporeans as they recall their memories of disappearing places in Singapore.

Take a walk down memory lane and revisit Old Places in Singapore once again.

Reminisce yesterday's past today. Don’t forget to tune in. Tell your friends!

Singapore in the 1970s... in colour!

Thought to help advertise one of my favourite films of Singapore's recent past - Peter Bogdanovich's interpretation of Paul Theroux's 'SAINT JACK'.

What will you see? Here's some hints:
Singapore River (before it was cleaned up)
Bugis Street (before it was cleaned up)
Ann Siang Road (before it was cleaned up)
Amoy Street (before it was cleaned up)
Orchard Road
Raffles Hotel, and some really interesting aspects of Singapore's history from the 70s that we have forgotten/not told ourselves.

This film was banned in Singapore until only a few years ago. Read more on this part of its history on Ben Slater's Blog.



Its showing on:

THU 26 NOV 2009 7:30pm &

FRI 27 NOV 2009 1:00pm

Gallery Theatre, Basement

National Museum, Stamford Road.

Here is the blurb from our National Museum's event site:

The only American film to be shot entirely on location in Singapore, Saint Jack was completed in secrecy in 1978 and then swiftly banned for nearly three decades. It’s an adaptation of an early novel by Paul Theroux about a middle-aged Italian-American drifter called Jack Flowers (played by Ben Gazzara), hustling a living in the seedier corners of Singapore. Director Peter Bogdanovich and his team set out to tell his story as authentically as possible, and spared no effort in scouting locations and casting locals. What they created was a vivid, colourful document of the swinging Lion City of the ‘70s, capturing the high and low-life, the gangsters, the towkays, the Brits, the Yanks, the good-time girls and boys, the glitzy hotels and the crumbling mansions with immense wit and style. Watching Saint Jack is a chance to return to a forgotten time and a vanished city.

Members of the cast and crew will be present at the screening on Thursday 26 November, 7.30pm, which will be hosted by Ben Slater, author of Kinda Hot: The Making of Saint Jack in Singapore.

Don't forget to join in the mystery tour!

City and Memory on Film

Some of us might have read the recent letter in the ST Forum - titled 'Where did you go, my Singapore of old?' by Mr Vincent Paul Carthigasu, and kindly highlighted on Alvin's Blog.

One beautiful example of capturing a 'lost' city will be shown this weekend at the National Museum during a retrospective of noted director - Terence Davies, from the UK.



In particular, Davies’s most recent film, Of Time and The City (2008) is both a love song and a eulogy to Liverpool which revisits the territory of his earlier narrative films. It is also a response to memory, reflection and the experience of losing a sense of place as the skyline changes and time takes it toll. Davies believes passionately that British stories like Of Time and The City must be told by British film makers. There can only be truth in a story which is truly specific to a time and place. And it is in that truth that universal appeal will be found.

Do try to catch this, and his other films, this weekend. It is rare for his films to travel to Singapore. And some films just don't look good on the small screen.

Perhaps one day, we will have a film about Singapore, just like this. But I also hope that we will not have lost all of our treasured spots... in the meantime, here is one view of Singapore in 1938, caught on film, from an outsider,s eyes...