KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 7 — It is never a good thing when a whole segment has to be scrapped from a film festival due to censorship issue.
As it turns out, Singaporean filmmaker Tan Pin Pin's Singapore GaGa was not the only movie Malaysian censors took issue with for the upcoming Singapore Film Festival in Kuala Lumpur.
According to TODAY, Malaysia's Film Censorship Board had also requested edits for the short films The Impossibility of Knowing, Singapore Panda (Sun Koh), Autograph Book (Wee Li Lin) and Hentak Kaki (James Khoo).
When all four directors instead chose to pull their movies from the festival, the whole short film segment ended up being cancelled.
The anthology 7 Letters also faced similar issue when censors asked Jack Neo's segment in the movie to be edited (for the usage of the vulgar language "curse your whole family" in Cantonese), though the organisers managed to successfully appealed against this.
It was not such a happy ending for two other feature films, Ken Kwek's Unlucky Plaza and Liao Jiekai's As You Were.
Unlucky Plaza, a comedic thriller about a man who holds a group of people hostage in a millionaire’s bungalow, was asked to edit its sex scenes and language, amounting to eight to 10 edits, while As You Were was requested one sex scene edit.
Both movies were withdrawn from the festival without appeal.
The movies were supposed to be screened at the Singapore Film Festival by Titian Budaya, which is set to take place this January 14 to 17 at selected GSC cinemas.
The festival is part of the Titian Budaya programme, which is held since November 21, 2015 to January 17, 2016 in celebration of 50 years of friendship between Singapore and Malaysia. — Cinema Online
