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GUARDED BUT IRREPRESSIBLE: Miss Tan has avoided tackling politics in her works, but believes there must be a place in Singapore for political films. -- ST PHOTO: ALAN LIM
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THE most startling event in local politics for documentary film-maker Tan Pin Pin occurred in 1987 when she was 17.
On May 21 that year, 16 people were arrested under the Internal Security Act (ISA). Among them was 40-year-old Catholic church worker Vincent Cheng.
Shortly after his arrest, Cheng appeared on television and confessed to being part of a Marxist plot to overthrow the Government. He was eventually detained for three years under the ISA.
'I was too young to fully understand what was happening, but I saw him on TV and felt a sting,' Miss Tan tells Insight over tea at a Waterloo Street coffee shop.
The impression it left on her was one of how 'the full machinery of the state' could be brought to bear on an individual. And it made her wonder about what recourse to justice the person had, she explains.
The discomfort of witnessing this and what she felt were other politically controversial events in the past 20 years, is part of the reason Miss Tan, now 38, has so far avoided dealing with explicitly political subjects in her films.
In fact, her documentaries are lyrical in nature and her themes, though set in Singapore, are more universal than local.
As in her last documentary in 2005, the critically acclaimed Singapore Gaga, her latest film records Singaporean landscapes and individual testimonies, and eschews broad conclusions about social phenomena or the effects of public policy on society.
Invisible City, which cost $160,000 and took a year to make, will open at the Arts House on July22.
The film is a collage of interviews with people who have stories to tell for posterity, but whose narratives are threatened either by social stigma, policy or simply the passage of time.
It is a problem that is urgent in, but not confined to, Singapore, Miss Tan says.
'If you ask, say, the Americans or the British, they would probably say there are certain parts of their history which have been under-represented in the mainstream, and that needs to be addressed.'
These may be oral or 'unofficial' histories, she explains, adding that in Singapore's rapidly changing landscape, the instinct to preserve is as significant as the artefacts, documents and images that are being preserved.
The film does touch on some political matter, such as Japanese war history and alternative accounts of student activism in the Chinese schools of the 1950s. But this, she insists, is incidental.
She continues to be apprehensive about tackling politics head-on in her films, but feels there must be a place in Singapore for such films.
Part of her reservation is fuelled by a concern about censorship, which she experienced when one of her earlier short films, Lurve Me Now, an animated love story, was banned in 1999.
Beyond the silver screen, however, Miss Tan is candid in describing what she regards as the problems of Singapore's 'soft authoritarian' political system, and its longer-term implications.
'There must be a sense of power sharing and debate. The current establishment can't envisage that in a real way because that would be acceding too much control, and worst-case scenarios about the tearing of Singapore's social fabric always come to mind,' she argues.
'But in the long run, diversity might be the only way for Singapore to survive, because I don't think you can entrench a one-party system or ethos beyond another three generations.'
Such views reveal an interest in issues of governance that is guarded but irrepressible.
When asked by Insight if she will ever explore such political issues more explicitly in future projects, the film-maker finally concedes: 'I've not done it for the past two films, but maybe I will for the next one. Just to see what it's like.'
kenkwek@sph.com.sg
shpeh@sph.com.sg
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