Singapore, officially the Republic of Singapore, is an island city-state in Southeast Asia. It lies one degree north of the equator, at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, with Indonesia's Riau Islands to the south and Peninsular Malaysia to the north. Singapore's territory consists of one main island along with 62 other islets. Since independence, extensive land reclamation has increased its total size by 23%. The nation is known for its transition from a developing to a developed country in a single generation under the leadership of its founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.
The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States or America, is a country comprising 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is slightly smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U.S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the most populous city is New York City. Most of the country is located contiguously in North America between Canada and Mexico.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a professional honorary organization with the stated goal of advancing the arts and sciences of motion pictures. The Academy's corporate management and general policies are overseen by a Board of Governors, which includes representatives from each of the craft branches.
As of 2018[update], a total of twelve films have been submitted for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but none has yet received an Oscar nomination.
Submissions
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has invited the film industries of various countries to submit their best film for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film since 1956.[2] The Foreign Language Film Award Committee oversees the process and reviews all the submitted films. Following this, they vote via secret ballot to determine the five nominees for the award.[1] Below is a list of the films that have been submitted by Singapore for review by the Academy for the award by year and the respective Academy Awards ceremony.
The secret ballot, also known as Australian ballot, is a voting method in which a voter's choices in an election or a referendum are anonymous, forestalling attempts to influence the voter by intimidation, blackmailing, and potential vote buying. The system is one means of achieving the goal of political privacy.
Three of the submissions - Be With Me, My Magic, and Tatsumi were directed by Eric Khoo. Both films were among the first Singaporean films featured at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Be With Me features four interconnected stories, with virtually no spoken dialogue. The majority of the story is told in English subtitles reflecting the thoughts of the deaf and blind lead actress, Theresa Chan. It was accepted by AMPAS as the official entry from Singapore but subsequently disqualified for being more than 50% in English and not in a Foreign Language.[16]My Magic tells the story of the relationship between an alcoholic Indo-Singaporean magician and his young son.
The Cannes Festival, until 2002 called the International Film Festival and known in English as the Cannes Film Festival, is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres, including documentaries from all around the world. Founded in 1946, the invitation-only festival is held annually at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès.
Two other submissions were large-scale musicals. In 1959, Colonial Singapore sent musical-drama The Kingdom and the Beauty, set in Imperial China. Directed by a Hong Kong based-Mainland Chinese director and produced by the famed Hong Kong Shaw Brothers film studio, there was minimal Singaporean input in the film-making. Nearly fifty years later, independent Singapore sent 881, a candy-colored musical-comedy-drama about a pair of Singaporean sisters who aspire to become champions at traditional Singaporean getai. This "uniquely Singaporean" film became the highest grossing Singaporean film of 2007 [17] and was released commercially in Japan but it won few awards overseas.
Hong Kong, officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, is a special administrative region on the eastern side of the Pearl River estuary in southern China. With over 7.4 million people of various nationalities in a 1,104-square-kilometre (426 sq mi) territory, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places in the world.
Mainland Chinese or Mainlanders are Chinese people who live in a region considered a "mainland". It is frequently used in the context of areas ruled by the People's Republic of China, referring to people from mainland China as opposed to other areas controlled by the state such as Hong Kong or Macau. The word is also often used by Taiwan people to distinguish the Chinese from Mainland China from themselves, if not calling the mainlanders and themselves as Chinese and Taiwanese directly respectively. Due to the rapid economic growth of China, mainlanders constitute a bigger and bigger part of global tourism.
A getai, is a usually boisterous live stage performance held during the Ghost Festival commonly held in Singapore, Malaysia and some parts of Indonesia, in contrast to the generally solemn mood of the festival. However the performance is also routinely played at other Chinese festivals. The stage setup is usually composed of temporary structures and situated in the suburbs of the city in any empty field or even in parking spaces or housing estate.
Despite having a flourishing Chinese and Malay film industry in the 1950s and 1960s, Singapore's film industry declined after independence in 1965. There were a few films that featured Singaporean actors and were set in Singapore, including Saint Jack, They Call Her Cleopatra Wong and Crazy Rich Asians. However, most of these were not produced or released in Singapore and cannot be labelled as truly Singaporean productions.
Related Research Articles
My Beloved Dearest is a 2013 Singaporean drama film directed by Sanif Olek. This film is notable as Singapore's first locally made Malay-language film since its independence from Malaysia in 1965.
‡ Dates and years listed for each ceremony were the eligibility period of film release in Los Angeles County. For the first five ceremonies, the eligibility period was done on a seasonal basis, from August to July. For the 6th ceremony, held in 1934, the eligibility period lasted from August 1, 1932, to December 31, 1933. Since the 7th ceremony held in 1935, the period of eligibility became the full previous calendar year from January 1 to December 31.
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