BREAKING: ‘Bangla’ the Only Singaporean Film Selected at Short Shorts Film Festival Asia 20192 min read

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Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia (SSFF & Asia) 2019 has released the list of shorts selected for this year’s lineup. Amongst them is Idette Chen’s Bangla, a local film that tells of an injured migrant worker who ends up moonlighting at a hawker stall in his desperation to send money home.

Nearly 10,000 films from over 130 countries and regions around the world were in the running, with the cream of the crop being selected to screen at the festival.

Bangla is also the winner of the National Youth Film Awards (NYFA) 2018, a national award that seeks to generate opportunities to further develop and exhibit youth talents who are highly adept in their respective fields across the various aspects of filmmaking in Singapore. The film, directed by Idette Chen, sheds light on the local-foreigner relationship in Singapore where the two communities co-exist for nothing more than a living transaction.

Chen is a film graduate from the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her film will be screened together with 200 other titles at SSFF & Asia 2019.

SSFF & Asia is a Japan-born festival and one of the largest film festivals in Asia. Held for two weeks from the 29th of May to 16 June, the festival was founded by actor Tetsuya Bessho with the aim of introducing Japanese audiences to short films – a format that many people in Japan were unfamiliar with.

In 2004, SSFF Asia was accredited as a qualifying festival for the annual Academy Awards. This means that the winner of the festival Grand Prix is eligible to be nominated in one of the short film categories of the Academy Awards the following year, offering a bridge between Japan and the Oscars.

Furthermore, Short Shorts Film Festival Asia (SSFF ASIA) was established with support from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in 2004, to introduce new Asian video culture and to nurture young filmmaking talents from the region. To this day, the two festivals are held together as Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia.

For more information, please visit SSFF & Asia’s official website.