After Eating Air

A conversation with Jasmine Ng Kin Kia by Gerald K.S. Sim

Gerald K.S. Sim talks to Jasmine Ng Kin Kia about the restoration of the cult film Eating Air, her cinematic influences, and why making Singapore cinema is important. This interview has been edited for clarity.

Maybe you can start us off by telling us a bit about who you are?

I am a filmmaker – I work between fiction and documentary. I’ve done short films and a feature, and I direct and executive produce for TV as well. I also work with other disciplines and other practitioners, such as in theatre and installation work. And I’ve been around the block a couple of times [laughs]. There are several generations of us filmmakers now which is great, because it’s not something you could say until recently. Singapore filmmaking has a history that’s short and filled with gaps.

I think the term you’re looking for is ‘veteran’.

That’s not for me to say! [Laughs]

Well, I think it’s interesting that you’d describe yourself first as a filmmaker because you’re most famous for Eating Air, with co-director Kelvin Tong. Recently you both crowdfunded a 4K restoration, which was shown in The Projector (a Singaporean independent cinema). I was just wondering, what sparked this fundraising process?

Fear of the tropics. It’s fear of the tropics. Singapore is a very humid tropical country; things don’t keep well. I think we were of the last generation of filmmakers who were still filming on celluloid. Quite soon after, people started to film digitally. Our negatives didn’t even survive – it was in a warehouse with our distributor, and somehow, the conditions weren’t pristine and it got so deteriorated. There was just this vinegary mush in rusty cans. Again, with most things in Singapore, because you’re rushing to get to the next projects, you kind of forget your earlier work. At the same time, you haven’t got that distance to feel like; okay, do I want to tackle something I just did? Am I altogether that proud of it?

We honestly didn’t think too much about it, and then Warren Sin – who was the film programmer at the National Museum of Singapore – had a programming series where he asked Singaporean filmmakers to screen double bills, pairing films they had made with another film that they picked that has some sort of correlation. We picked Billy Liar (dir. John Schlesinger, 1963, UK) to screen with Eating Air.

At that time, we had a few surviving prints of Eating Air and sent those for the projection test. And then the reality hit…the first few hundred frames were okay, and then all of a sudden, oh my god. We started to see the discolouration, the scratches…and we realised there were frames missing. I felt physically sick, I was going to throw up [laughs]. That was when we finally woke up and said, ‘We have to do something about this.’

Warren went of his own accord – bless him! – to Kantana Film Lab in Bangkok, which was where most of us had done our film lab work. He was able to locate an inter-positive and an inter-negative, which you use to put subtitles on before you strike the positive prints. He and Chai Yee Wei of Mocha Chai Labs (Singaporean boutique film studio) said, ‘Let’s do this. Let’s restore your film before it’s too late.’ Because every day you don’t, you’re just waiting for your film to deteriorate more.

So, the IMDA (Infocomm Media Development Authority) was going to fund and ask the Asian Film Archives to oversee the restoration project. But COVID happened! And all of a sudden, the funding had to be prioritised towards the efforts to support the industry, because many of us were out of work for the first few months of the pandemic and barely limped out of the lockdown months. At that point, we decided that we would find ways to raise money on our own instead. We sorted out our own private funding just enough to afford the actual transfer and digital restoration, and Netflix picked it up as part of their Asian film library. People have been asking us over the years how they can watch the film again – more so after seeing excerpts of Eating Air in Shirkers – and along with asking when it is coming out on Netflix, people have also asked if the film can be shown in cinemas again on the big screen.

So [through that] the idea came up – if we asked people to contribute towards making a cinema screening possible, would they do it? Many people connected with Eating Air at a certain point in their life, particularly when there weren’t many local independent films and we were one of the first. The idea that this is ours, it sounds like us, it looks like us, but it was also this ‘indie’ film that sort of had this universal pop culture appeal; [it was framed as] this weird ‘kung fu motorcycle love story’. A lot of people had a lot of fond memories of the film. We thought maybe those people would be interested to help finance the DCP (digital cinema print). We shot and framed the film for the big screen, and ideally that is how it should be seen.

So, we put out that call and people started buying tickets to the screening that would work towards paying for the digital print. We were floored that there were even any people who couldn’t make it on that date, but wanted to donate that money regardless. I’d text them, ‘You know it comes out on Netflix two days after, right?’ They said, ‘Yes, but we want this film to have a digital print, so it can be seen on the big screen.’ That’s how we managed to do it and even recover some of the other costs of getting the film preserved, restored, and fixed.

We had six more screenings, and it was pretty much full house all the time. We were quite surprised by that. Mind you, this is even when the film was already on Netflix, and there are a lot of distractions and things to do in Singapore, people didn’t need to go to the cinema – but they did. And now that we have the DCP, and Eating Air can travel the world again, I hope [we get to show it overseas], if any festivals or indie cinemas are keen.

We gave part of the proceeds to The Projector as well, because it’s a precious space! We really wanted to make sure any independent cinema that curates great work and goes out of its way for advocacy must survive COVID. So many businesses were just toppling over during the pandemic and we wanted to do whatever we can to help keep The Projector afloat.

I’m struck by how you realised that Eating Air needed restoration when you were about to screen it alongside Billy Liar. Billy Liar is an important film in the Western canon and was restored some time ago, whereas you guys had to petition for the crowdfunding of Eating Air’s restoration. Do you think there’s a disparity between how restoration is done in Singapore and elsewhere?

We don’t have a long cinema history, so all that work of restoration is relatively new to us.

I think that Cathay-Keris, Shaw Brothers, P. Ramlee old local films, a lot of them were transferred just for the sake of transferring, just so they could sell VCDs and DVDs at the pasar malam (night market). It was only with the Cinémathèque (film programming division at the National Museum of Singapore) and the Asian Film Archive (AFA) that they very purposefully joined these dots of Singaporean cinematic history. The museum started tracking films and looked for surviving prints, getting them restored – they’ve done a lot of very important work.

We had to look at other cinematheques and archives worldwide to understand how they went about their work. That is something that we’re still learning to do. I’m sure for the UK, it would have been the same. Someone started saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got to start to preserve films and make sure they’re not lost to the ravages of time.’ I’m sure every place in the world would have some version of that process and their priorities. But funding is always tough.

Eating Air is more than 20 years old now…

Did you watch it and go, ‘What are those things they’re holding in their hands that make funny sounds? Is it a Tamagotchi?’

My dad had a pager and I actually did think it was a Tamagotchi.

I was a bit nervous to figure out how gen Z would react to the film. 

I mean, it’s retro what, no meh?

[Laughs] What’s the meaning of ‘retro’? I don’t know. We had a good mix of people coming to the restored screenings... A lot of people wrote to us and said, ‘I saw this in junior college (high school), and then I made my boyfriend watch this in university.’ They had a VHS copy, I’m not sure who they copied it from [laughs]. I suppose there weren’t many Singaporean independent films then, so Eating Air made its mark. With a damn great soundtrack, I have to say. I’m always so proud of the soundtrack and the bands that played on it.

But yeah, I saw students of mine who are still in school or have just graduated, who came to see the restored film in the cinema. I didn’t ask them what they thought about it though [laughs]. I’m not going to give them a refund if they didn’t like it. It was our first film. Apart from the restoration process, I had not watched the film in full since 2000 [laughs]. It makes me cringe, you know! All I see are mistakes. ‘Why did we do that? I hate that transition.’ There’s no way I would ever do things like that [again]. But [I guess] there’s no point thinking that way, because I would never make that film again. At the same time, we had a great time making the film, there was a lot of fondness for it. So, it’s nice to be able to bring that film back. There’s a lot of old Singapore [which is lost now] captured in the film, as all the local films here tend to do, because we have a habit of constantly demolishing and rebuilding. We are an amnesiac nation.

The era in which you made Eating Air saw the Singaporean independent film industry focusing on the underbelly of Singapore, mostly relying on non-actors appearing in films such as 15 (dir. Royston Tan, 2003), Mee Pok Man (dir. Eric Khoo, 1995), and 12 Storeys (dir. Eric Khoo, 1997). I was wondering what is the appeal of that lost part of Singapore 20 years on when the country is so sanitised?

I don’t think it’s a lost part of Singapore as much as a lost part of themselves [laughs]. But I’m kind of not joking, because you know, you’d be somewhere, and you hear a piece of music, and then all these memories keep flooding back. And objectively, when you listen to that track, you know it’s awful, but it has a special place in your heart. That’s what great music, great films, do. That image brings you to a certain place in time. You find a piece of yourself and try to reconnect that to how you are now.

[But] I don’t think it’s nostalgia – not nostalgia for that specific time, the 90s. It’s that time in your life. Some people were in their 20s or 30s when Eating Air came out, while others were in secondary school. They were at different points of their lives. But I guess it resonates. But hopefully it was also a fun, frolicking good watch with a sickeningly rocking soundtrack [laughs].

Maybe it has a certain resonance for Singaporeans because it’s ours. So, they’re a lot more forgiving in terms of all its flaws and faults and silliness. And the immature craft of the directors [laughs]. I think it’s that sense that this is ours, that you identify with it, but then again maybe foreign audiences will watch this and go, ‘What the hell is this?’

One of my favourite scenes in the film was that long tracking shot in the mall with the music made out of sounds in the mall. It’s so specific to my lived experience…you know what malls mean to us Singaporeans.

We ripped off that scene [laughs]. It was a tribute to the sequence in Delicatessen (1991, France), the Jeunet-Caro film. It was that whole idea of a symphony of these, you know…What’s the film school word for it?

Diegetic sounds?

Yeah, diegetic sounds. The reason why we picked Billy Liar to screen with Eating Air was because [it felt like a response to] Billy’s fantasies. In a place like Singapore where you can get from one end to the other end of the island within 20 minutes, how do you live a more exciting life? A life larger than mundane mall-ridden Singapore? It’s all these fantasies that you get from pop culture, from wuxia comics to manga to kung fu movies. That kind of rojak, that crazy melange of different influences from everywhere and anywhere. So, we were celebrating that more than anything else.

At the same time, it’s so specific to the Singaporean experience.

Well, Eating Air was selected for competition at Rotterdam for the Young Tiger Awards [in 2000]. That was pretty damn prestigious. I mean, at that time we didn’t have a clue [as to] how important that was as a first platform. So, I think other people do recognise these pop culture influences as a shared language, but I think nobody outside Singapore is going to call it a ‘cult film’ the way Singaporeans do. Maybe it’s interesting for other people to see ‘What Singaporeans smell like and sound like’, apart from the Singapore Tourism Board videos.

Let’s talk about recent Singaporean cinema. I want to hear what you think as someone who’s been in the industry for so long. Like I told you before, I would characterise some Singaporean films as ‘Golden Horse (Taiwanese awards for Chinese-language films) bait’.

That’s not true! Why do you say that? I mean, first of all, what I always bring up to people including the Singapore Film Commission and other filmmakers is that Ilo Ilo (dir. Anthony Chen, 2013) premiered at Cannes and went on to win Singapore’s first Caméra d’Or. Southeast Asia’s first Caméra d’Or. So, it’s not ‘just’ a Golden Horse film, except for the fact that it also won Best Film at Golden Horse.

What I did say to the Film Commission is that we have to be careful about the risk of people looking at Ilo Ilo and going, ‘Hey! It’s a golden double-barrelled opportunity where if you make your Singaporean film predominantly in Mandarin, then you can get your film into a top-tier film festival in the West and also be lauded in the East, the East [in this context] being the Chinese-speaking world, and still get a chance at the Foreign-language Oscars!’

We should be concerned if people only want to replicate Ilo Ilo’s success as a kind of investment formula along with a ‘language strategy’. Does it mean then that there’s no place for other Singaporean films in our other local languages? Might investors end up ignoring Singaporean scripts with English dialogue because then it doesn’t qualify for the Foreign Language Oscars, or pass on films predominantly in Malay or Tamil, because then these Singaporean films don’t qualify for Golden Horse? That’s a problem, because we already see under-representation of Malay-language and Tamil-language Singaporean films. Where’s the opportunity for our minority-language filmmakers who are as Singaporean as Anthony Chen, as Ilo Ilo? This is not the market’s responsibility to correct or balance off, but something crucial that our film commission must deal with and give support to local cultures and minority voices...

Some people will still reverse-engineer [their work] and start with a prize or box office figure in mind and work backwards. But I don’t think interesting filmmakers work that way. I mean, do you think Kirsten Tan had at any point said something like, ‘I don't want Pop Aye (2017) to go to Golden Horse’”? It’s just that it can’t qualify because it’s not in Mandarin even if it’s directed by a Singaporean filmmaker who is ethnically Chinese. Everybody’s happy for their film to go to as many awards and festivals as possible! And I think filmmakers don’t immediately say that I’m going to make a film that's going to Sundance as opposed to Cannes. Kirsten wanted to make Pop Aye and Pop Aye was perfect for Sundance – in that order. You are the filmmaker that you are, you make that film, tell the story that you want, and it’s up to you and your producers to strategise what funding sources you can tap on, which investors might be keen for whatever potential returns, and which festivals would be most receptive, most excited by a film like yours.

You’ll have to think about whether it’s the kind of film that gets awards, but nobody in Singapore may be ready for that kind of storytelling, as opposed to a Jack Neo film where movie-going audiences are willing to pay for a ticket to go and watch. You make your own choices for the films you stand for.

I think the beauty of Jack Neo’s films is that he relies almost entirely on a local audience.

As you should if you could, and why not, because I know the problem with Singapore, something critical that we keep bringing up to the government, who funds a lot of our work, is that for everybody else around us, if they don’t make films for themselves, nobody else is going to make films for them. Who else is going to make Thai language films for Thais? Who else is going to make Korean television except themselves? You can’t say that Malaysians don’t need Bahasa Melayu films because they can just watch Bahasa Indonesia films, it’s [totally] different.

But in Singapore, because of the many languages we speak here and because of our history, we tend to always watch other people’s works. We look towards Hong Kong, Taiwan, China for Chinese language films, Indonesia and Malaysia for Bahasa Indonesia and Malay films, and Kollywood, Bollywood for Indian language films, and of course, Hollywood for English-language movies. Even though we may be of the same ethnicities and share languages as people in these other countries, they don’t sound or behave like us here in Singapore – it’s a completely different experience and way of being. But because of our small population and market size, it’s difficult to justify the expense that comes with making work in Singapore. But we cannot possibly say that we will just outsource our own culture-making and representation, because things are too expensive in Singapore and somebody else has done it elsewhere.

We cannot! And more so, it’s a losing battle when you can watch an entire Korean series on your handphone in the MRT train, and yet we don’t purposefully make sure that we get to showcase our own stories and see ourselves on-screen, hear ourselves. We’re pretty much saying that we don’t matter, and that we don’t need to see and examine ourselves.

So, would it be safe to say that you’d like to see more films that examine the Singapore self? What sort of films do you want to see in the coming years with young filmmakers?

I don’t think everybody starts out going, ‘Oh this is going to be the definitive film about Singapore.’ I think it’s going to be both macro and micro at the same time. Not to be burdened [with preconceived notions] that ‘This work is going to categorically examine the Singapore psyche’, because the thing about Singapore is that we’re so diverse. When we talk, we sometimes tend to paint ourselves with one broad brush and say, ‘Singaporeans are like this.’ But c’mon, look around your friends or your neighbours, step out of your neighbourhood, we know we live very, very diverse lives, but sometimes we don’t do ourselves any favours when we say things like ‘Singaporeans like to makan!’ As if that’s the be all and end all. Singaporeans just love to eat? Come on!

But if you want to do a film about that and be savagely funny and celebratory, then great, go do it! It doesn’t have to be some sort of tedious, ponderous self-examination. If you want to do [something] fun, go and have some serious ass-kicking good fun. But beyond that, surely there’d be some space to dive deeper, go beneath the surface. And I think we’ll get to see that more because it’s more accessible for people to make content [now]. It’s not so prohibitive – it’s not like ‘I don’t know anybody who has a camera, or who has a budget.’ Apart from the film schools here, a lot of people are self-taught [nowadays]. As it is, the film school of YouTube.

Lots of people here, as there are elsewhere, are making content for YouTube or TikTok and they’re experimenting. You see people like Hirzi Zulkiflie and Benjamin Kheng, who do such fun stuff, but it’s actually very [immersed within the language] of pop culture. You can see their film references. It’s a lot of wicked fun, but at the same time, quintessentially Singaporean. You just watch it and go like; it can’t be made anywhere else. And that's worth celebrating, that it can’t be made anywhere else, but by us, for us. I’m excited by the animation work of Jerrold Chong and Mark Wee of Finding Pictures, and also Tan Wei Keong, and am looking forward to the first features of He Shuming and Nicole Midori Woodford. Akan Datang!

Gerald K.S. Sim is studying archaeology and anthropology in London. He grew up between Jakarta and Singapore.