The festival winds down today. They’ll be announcing who gets to bring home what later on. The Southeast Asian Competition category is an impressive one: of the nine films, three were at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (Ho Tzu Nyen’s Here, Raya Martin’s Independencia and Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s Nymph). The others are no pushovers either having bagged awards at other festivals. With the nine films eligible for four awards, Yeo Siew Hua (aka Chris) joked that he’s got half a chance to bag one for In The House of Straw, which I’m catching later today.   ***   In the meantime, the past two days, I’ve been having a chat with local journos here as well as festival programmers to get to know more about how they run their festival. They’ve got some very interesting stories to tell, and in the light of what’s been happening with SIFF, there’s a lot to mull over if and when our own festival resurfaces next year. I’ll be writing about in TODAY next week.   ***   As for the films, it’s been all about Malaysia and the Philippines. In one of the issues of the festival daily, Royston Tan pointed to the filmmakers across the Causeway as doing some very interesting stuff. I missed James Lee’s Call If You Need Me but had a nice contrast in Amir Muhammad’s Malaysian Gods and the late Yasmin Ahmad’s Sepet and short Chocolate. Amir’s documentary, which caused quite a stir earlier at SIFF for having to get a police permit for, of all things, the Q&A portion, had the quirky tact of talking about Malaysia’s reformasi movement and the controversy surrounding Anwar Ibrahim’s sodomy and corruption trial in 1998. Juxtaposing recent interviews with people who work at the sites where various protests had taken place a decade ago, with explanatory, often tongue in cheek, text that details the blow by blow events that had happened. The result is a political commentary with a light touch. In fact, a bit too light for this viewer, who enjoyed its breezy approach (tabla instrumental interludes and all) but thought it could do with a bit more bite. But then again, maybe you could look at as a subtler-than-usual form of subversion. The same MO Yasmin has with her films. (Don’t think I’ll need to elaborate on how she uses the conventional drama genre to highlight racial issues – seeing as everyone’s a Yasmin fan). During the Q&A for Filipino director Adolfo Alix Jr.’s Aurora, a somewhat similar issue was brought up. The film, which is about a kidnapped woman trying to escape from her Muslim captors in the Southern Philippines, was brought to task with regards to its supposed mis-representation of Muslims-as-rebels (and rapists). It’s a film that’s banned in the Philippines for presumably the same thing. I won’t go into the details of how I rolled my eyes at such ludicrous accusations (the contrasting attitudes of the film’s two Muslim rebels – one rather guilt-ridden and the other an ass – makes Aurora’s position clear. That is, assholes are assholes regardless of your religion). Instead, I was interested at it utilizes the forest as a setting (and uses it very well, I must say) --  the same way at least two of the other films in the Southeast Asian Competition category do. Pen-ek’s supernatural tale Nymph is set for the most part in a forest somewhere in Thailand. Raya’s Filipino-American turn-of-the-century story Independencia also takes place in the forest – albeit one that was stage designed. Hmm, MacRitchie Reservoir anyone?