Film picks: Remembering Pema Tseden, Alien: Romulus, Ghostlight

Remembering Pema Tseden

Pema Tseden is not as well-known in Singapore compared with other Asian film-makers, so this four-film programme at The Projector aims to elevate his profile.

The Tibetan writer-director’s career was tragically cut short by his death at age 53 in 2023. He left a body of work which has gained recognition as plain-spoken stories set in his homeland, minus the sheen of Oriental mysticism that clouds many depictions of that mountainous country.

In the drama Tharlo (2015, PG, 123 minutes, Aug 31 and Sept 10, various timings), the shepherd Tharlo (Shide Nyima) is made to go to the city because he needs a photo taken for his identity card. There, he meets Yangtso (Yangshik Tso), a woman with bold city ways that surprise the man who has spent his life in the mountains.

The film was selected to screen at the Venice International Film Festival in 2015, where the film-maker earned a Best Director nomination. At the Golden Horse Film Festival and Awards in the same year, Tharlo won the Best Adapted Screenplay prize.

Balloon (2019, PG13, 103 minutes, Aug 28 and Sept 8, various timings) finds the director once more looking into the friction between modernity and tradition in Tibetan society. After the discovery of a condom, a herding family reckons with the national one-child policy, sexuality and spirituality.

In a road movie that blurs the line between reality and illusion, dreaming and waking, Jinpa (2018, NC16, 87 minutes, Sept 7 and 15, various timings) is about the titular character and truck driver, who picks up a hitchhiker intent on vengeance. 

Snow Leopard (2023, NC16, 109 minutes, Aug 24 and Sept 4 and 14, various timings) finds a herder facing the predator of the title, causing him to choose between his flock and the endangered creature, one with great spiritual significance in his culture. 

Several of the screenings will be accompanied by a virtual Q&A session in Mandarin with film industry professionals familiar with Pema Tseden’s work. English translations will be provided.

Where: Golden Village x The Projector at Cineleisure, Level 5, 8 Grange Road
MRT: Somerset/Orchard
When: Aug 24 to Sept 15, various timings
Admission: From $14
Info:

str.sg/yP3E

Sci-fi horror

Alien: Romulus (NC16)

119 minutes, now showing
4 stars

It has come full circle: This movie, the ninth in the franchise – if one includes the two spin-offs – is a homage to Ridley Scott’s 1979 original, while also being one of 2024’s best films in any genre.

Uruguayan director and co-writer Fede Alvarez has shown the way forward for the sci-fi horror series, which till now has found itself mired in philosophising (Alien 3, 1992; Prometheus, 2012; Alien: Covenant, 2017) or the same old running and screaming (Alien Resurrection, 1997).

Alien: Romulus is set in the period between Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). On a bleak mining planet run by the ruthless Weyland-Yutani corporation, a group of young people, sick of being treated like slaves, plot their escape to a better world.

Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her lifelong android companion Andy (David Jonsson), along with friends Tyler (Archie Renaux), Kay (Isabela Merced), Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and Navarro (Aileen Wu), hatch an exit plan that involves breaking into a derelict space station.

The bond between Rain and Andy is the poignant heart of a story that would otherwise be a cacophony of killing. Spaeny’s Rain holds the role of victim and warrior in one consistent package, while Jonsson makes Andy deeply human.

Drama

Ghostlight (NC16)

115 minutes, now showing at The Projector
4 stars

Somewhat improbably, gruff middle-aged construction worker Dan (Keith Kupferer) is drafted off the street into a community theatre production of Romeo And Juliet – cast, even more improbably, as Romeo – that helps him confront and heal from a personal loss.

He is emotionally closed off, adrift from his schoolteacher wife Sharon (Tara Mallen). Their teen daughter Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) is, meanwhile, having anger management issues as they anguish over a certain looming lawsuit.

Little by little, unobtrusively, the American family-in-crisis drama Ghostlight layers in the narrative background. There has been a devastating death, the circumstances a present-day replay of Shakespeare’s classic doomed romance.

The synchronous plot is contrived. But Alex Thompson and his co-director and screenwriter Kerry O’Sullivan are such natural storytellers, their second joint feature following their award-winning Saint Frances (2019) succeeds in being intimate.

It is also very much authentic because Dan, Sharon and Daisy are a real family: The Kupferer-Mallens are stage veterans of Chicago, where the story is set.

Dan discovers kinship and purpose. It is hugely moving, watching the broken, inarticulate man process his tragedy by performing in one. Whang Yee Ling