Ghost Writer by The Necessary Stage

I struggled with The Necessary Stage's Gitanjali when I reviewed it in 2014. It was a sweeping but disparate production, each element straining in a different direction in an attempt to grasp or portray something cosmic and transcendental. Who, or what, did Tagore symbolise? How did his poetry fit into the story of a family struggling with carrying on the tradition of Indian classical dance? And what of his muse, Kadambari? The attempt to bring multiple disciplines together - dance, multimedia, theatre, a lush soundscape of the experimental and the classical - felt rough at the seams.

Ghost Writer isn't quite a reworking of Gitanjali as it is a reincarnation – the same but different, echoes and excavated memories of a past life given an entirely new body. It's a pared-down, intimate 75 minutes in a black box that manages to articulate a great deal more than its former, unwieldier incarnation. I'm not sure if those who haven't seen Gitanjali might find Ghost Writer baffling or liberating (to quote a friend with whom I discussed the show after), but as someone familiar with Gitanjali's characters, I found aspects of their personality already shaded into my mind and now given flesh.

Ghost Writer is, in a sense, about ghosts. It is about how one generation of a family haunts the next, but also about how an artist's inspiration and muse can turn into a spectre that haunts her every sentence or dance move. Tagore is haunted by Kadambari, his sister-in-law, who died tragically. Star bharatanatyam teacher Savitri (Sukania Venugopal) haunts her protege, Priya (Ruby Jayaseelan), as the younger woman moves to Canada to pursue new forms of dance, but ends up exotifying herself, "becoming more Indian than India", to become a prominent choreographer. But Priya haunts Savitri, too, even in her absence, as Savitri struggles to find a successor to lead her dance institution. Savitri's son, Shankara (Ebi Shankara), is haunted by his mother's inspiration, Tagore, so much so that he devotes his PhD to the study of the writer. And Shankara's wife, Nandini (Sharda Harrison), is haunted by the death of her sister - and the parallels between that death and the death of Kadambari. Who dictates the life we choose to lead? Do we choose our own path, or do others nudge us onto it? Is the dance a divine one, or is it the artist's own?

The production starts out slowly, with a few clunky exchanges, but it is the second half that brings the play home. The character of Jeremy (Jereh Leong), the Canadian dancer whom Priya finds alluring, feels significantly shallower than the rest, an arc I honestly felt could have been done away with or played as a non-speaking role. (Correlation: He's not in the stronger second half.) Once the play is done laying out its exposition, it mines the complex relationships that orbit each character, and that is the richest part of the performance.

I think Ghost Writer continues the journey The Necessary Stage has taken, in this chapter of their output, into what a truly collaborative, interdisciplinary production looks like, giving a creative team from all backgrounds equal voices throughout rehearsal and development, and giving a prominent platform to typically 'design' elements (multimedia, sound, spatial design). From Gitanjali (2014) to untitled women (2015) to Manifesto (2016). It brings out some surprising and intriguing results. What I appreciated much more fully in Ghost Writer was its strides to make the production truly multidisciplinary, where a conversation could be begun in speech but concluded in dance and still have its narrative arc remain completely clear. Actresses Sukania Venugopal as the stubborn Savitri and Ruby Jayaseelan as her star pupil Priya are twin revelations in this aspect and throughout the production. Their opening conversation, from Priya's growing success in the school to her sudden departure, is exquisitely portrayed through Indian classical dance, particularly in that single, pivotal moment where Savitri realises that her student has, she believes, betrayed her. 

While dance blends marvellously into the mix, the multimedia element of the production is less consistent. Some of the visuals are stunning to behold, particularly in a scene where Priya, reflected in a mirror and projected on several screens through some clever camera work and choreography (I'm still bending my head over how they pulled that off), dances a solo that is at once vulnerable and powerful. But some of the video work over-informs, the way a melodrama might overdo its nudge-wink when the audience already understands a plot point. I get the sense that the creative team is playing with that tension between film and stage here, the same way that Ghost Writer's multimedia artist Brian Gothong Tan explored that tension in 2012's Decimal Points 4.44, where he challenged an audience to watch both film and theatrical versions of a story simultaneously. That works if both elements are equally strong. Here, some of the film feels redundant, e.g. a short that lingers over Priya and Jeremy's intimate relationship (and then he recedes into the background for the rest of the show, so I don't understand any of his influence over her), or another that portrays what happened to Nandini's sister (the beauty, I felt, was in the agony of the mystery - the way we will never know why Kadambari killed herself). 

But Ghost Writer, unlike the ambivalence I felt after Gitanjali, emphasises redemption. Nandini's storyline comes to the fore as the production unfolds. She starts out a lonely and bereaved 'expat wife' in an arranged marriage, not unlike Kadambari, but then finds her voice in writing. She creates her own agency (and by agency I mean her capacity to act of her own free will). The characters of Ghost Writer exorcise their ghosts not through violence or defiance, but through letting go. I think Tagore's beautiful poem, revealed close to the end, embodies it best:

THE FIRST GREAT SORROW

I was walking along a path over-grown with grass, when suddenly I heard from some one behind, “See if you know me?”
I turned round and looked at her and said, “I cannot remember your name.”
She said, “I am that first great Sorrow whom you met when you were young.”
Her eyes looked like a morning whose dew is still in the air.
I stood silent for some time till I said, “Have you lost all the great burden of your tears?”
She smiled and said nothing. I felt that her tears had had time to learn the language of smiles.
“Once you said,” she whispered, “that you would cherish your grief for ever.”
I blushed and said, “Yes, but years have passed and I forget.”
Then I took her hand in mine and said, “But you have changed.”
“What was sorrow once has now become peace,” she said.

Stray thoughts:

• I realise I didn't mention the fantastic sound artist Bani Haykal and vocalist Namita Mehta, the sonic backbone on which the piece hinges. They are the rhythm to the narrative, carrying the push and pull, the dramatic tension of the plot. Bani won the 2015 Life Theatre Award for Sound Design for his work on Gitanjali.
• French-Laotian dancer and choreographer Ole Khamchanla drifts through the production as a sort of representation of Tagore. The piece concludes with what feels like a dance-meditation on what it means to be a part of this path of life, a hypnotic, entrancing epilogue that compelled me to sway, in my seat, to the beat.

Dark Room by Edith Podesta at The Studios

I watched the first incarnation of Edith Podesta's Dark Room two years ago (then titled Dark Room x8). It was part of the Esplanade's RAW series, the developmental platform of their Studios season, and I was completely taken by the intimate, stripped down production - in need of a much tighter edit, but a focused piece that was deliberately non-judgmental about the experiences of these men in the Singapore prison system, leaving it to the audience to draw their own conclusions about punitive systems and the efficacy of corporal punishment and rehabilitation in Singapore.

It followed eight men as they made their way from sentencing through jail to eventual release, eight men from markedly different backgrounds (different socio-economic groups, education levels, sexualities, ethnicities, religions, countries) who responded to their incarceration in various ways. These were real stories, extracted from hours of interviews with former inmates - who remained anonymous, both in name and in terms of the crimes they committed. The stage was bare, the use of sound and light was minimal - used to lightly demarcate certain physical spaces and emotional conditions - which meant that the black box space itself became a kind of imaginary prison and that the focus was solely on the performers, who went through cycles of guilt, redemption and unexpected companionship, a darkness lightened by surprising and affecting moments of levity. 

After the showcase, I asked Edith if she planned on expanding the work into a full production. At that point, she wasn't sure; she had some ideas about interviewing a group of women who had been through the prison system in Singapore as a parallel piece, but noted that it was extremely difficult to find willing interviewees. 

So I was very pleased to hear that Dark Room had evolved into a full-scale production as part of The Studios, retaining most of the same ensemble and adding a few more verbatim interviews. Some of these additions complement the existing material seamlessly, such as the voices of the parents of a former offender (played by real-life husband and wife Lim Kay Siu and Neo Swee Lin, both conveying the perfect, aching amount of fragility and regret). But others - which I will get into - didn't quite work for me. (Spoilers ahead.)

The heart of the piece - which I loved - remains the same. The play is still a journey, as it was before, of self-discovery and of great, touching humanity. There are hilarious segments about attempts to improve the food and the limited 'yard time' juxtaposed against harrowing segments on caning and crushing loneliness. Edith sets out the various elements of imprisonment: schedules, visit times, confinement, etc, in a methodical, even-handed way, allowing us an aerial view of the prisons process while allowing us to become acquainted, in an intimate way, with the people in it.

But that arm's length, documentarian's eye that I had admired so much in the earlier work in process seems to have diminished somewhat. This work wanders into issues of innocence when it is unclear if the narrator is unreliable, and the treacly strains of 'Amazing Grace' worm their way into a preachy ending, playing on repeat to a chorus of 'I still don't think what I did was wrong' or 'I don't understand why so-and-so had to be imprisoned'. While these questions are pertinent, they seem tacked on as a conclusion from an entirely different discussion and validated without due process, which would have been a rigorous examination of the criminal justice system (a la perhaps the first season of the Serial podcast or Netflix's Making A Murderer) rather than the prisons/rehabilitation system, which the piece is dissecting. 

Another strand I cannot quite reconcile is that of the sole female inmate, running parallel to the stories of the eight male inmates as what I'm guessing was meant to be a counterweight to the maleness of the main thread and/or a deeper look at solitary confinement (as opposed to group confinement among the men). Her story is a powerful, necessary one, but in this context feels frustratingly tokenistic; whenever the character appears - often at abrupt times - she scrambles the cohesion of the piece, coming across as an afterthought rather than a companion narrative because she is responding to an entirely different set of stimuli in an entirely different environment. I think her story would have been better framed in a production of its own, rather than drowned out by an ensemble of men who are on a united, interlocking journey leavened by their diversity. The male ensemble, who had the benefit of performing together previously, also share a compelling chemistry that tends to overwhelm the presence of the lone female actor.

This does not make Dark Room any less profound, however. I think testimonial/documentary theatre lends itself especially well to the need for anonymity in this production. We know these people are real, but the distance between us and them, mediated by the performers, provokes empathy and discourse over a temporary emotional rise of sympathy or pity. The audience is constantly navigating the tension between reality and representation, made to view the production with a more journalistic lens, weighing the information being presented to them and the reliability of each narrator.

This genre works exceptionally well in unpacking contentious current affairs - take for instance Drama Box's dissection of urban redevelopment and the Bukit Brown affair in It Won't Be Too Long: Dusk during last year's Singapore International Festival of Arts, presenting the audience with a wide variety of views but also knitting them into a coherent narrative; some of the performers played interviewees of a different gender, and I think that cognitive dissonance worked well to give audience members a different perspective on recognisable interviewees and public figures. Then there's the film version, Tom McCarthy's Oscar-winning Spotlight, which deliberately avoids "tidy moral takeaways". And often there are no tidy solutions to the problems presented: land scarcity in Singapore, sexual abuse in the Catholic church, the consequences of imprisonment. I think a question mark at the end of productions is more constructively provocative than finality. It prompts us to continue the conversation.

(Stray thoughts will come after if/when I have them...)

Stray thoughts:

• Chris Chua's modular set was clever and versatile and Darren Ng (sound design) and Adrian Tan (lighting design) do great work, but I missed the minimalism of the first incarnation where the prison had to be imagined and there were fewer cues designed to evoke specific types of emotion.
• You can view the full house programme online here.

Manifesto by Drama Box & The Necessary Stage

Three years ago, I attended a press conference on the top floor of Drama Box's narrow shophouse premises in Chinatown. A group of arts practitioners had come together to unveil their Manifesto For The Arts (page here), what they hoped would be a call, a rallying cry, that artists and arts lovers would be able to align themselves with. I was a younger reporter at the time, only just beginning to understand my beat, and the sound of a 'manifesto' was at once empowering and intimidating to me.

This was their manifesto:

1. Do not attempt to define Art for others.
2. Art is fundamental.
3. Art unifies and divides.
4. Art is about possibilities.
5. Art can be challenged but not censored.
6. Art is political.

I wrote about it in the paper, as did several other journalists, but as time went on and other arts policy issues came to the fore – censorship, term licensing, grants structures, changes of leadership at the various ministries and statutory boards – the sound of that rallying cry got fainter. Until The Necessary Stage (TNS) and Drama Box announced that they would be doing a collaborative production titled Manifesto. 

Manifesto, I have come to realise, is all of the above. 

1. It does not attempt to define itself. When TNS and Drama Box said that this would be a 'challenging' play, they were putting it lightly. It ignores genre and convention. It is an epic but also a series of vignettes. It blends film with 'liveness' and more static audio and visual installations. It is a meta-play – you see the actors preparing to enter the stage, their costume changes, the actors playing an actor playing another actor, it presents a genre of theatre (e.g. forum theatre) within another genre of theatre (e.g. naturalism). Actors and designers – who would often take a more behind-the-scenes role in a production, such as the sound designer or the multimedia designer – were all on an equal, open footing, all visible on stage. All of them had speaking roles. 
2. It is fundamental. Manifesto depicts artists at their most elemental, creating work and examining why they create what they create, and how they respond to reactions to their work and who they are.
3. It unifies and divides. There has been an outpouring of support and critical acclaim for the production, but there have also been some detractors. 
4. It is about possibilities. Or perhaps finding possibility in impossibility. Artists are hemmed in by cycles of history that seem to repeat themselves. One theatre group with a cause is spawned, only to struggle, collapse, and then birth another theatre group half a century later out of its ashes – but is it a birth or just a moment before death? Forum theatre – where audience members are allowed to stop a scene and replace any of the actors to see how they might resolve a conflict better – is used heavily as a device of possibility. How can these narratives, these tragic personal histories, be altered? What knowledge and foresight can we draw from counterfactual history?
5. It can be challenged, but not censored. It was certainly challenged (see: 'Singapore play about role of artists gets R18 rating', The Straits Times; and Alfian's response to the rating), but we can debate whether it was subject to censorship or not. The play often depicts self-censorship as endemic of Singapore of the 1980s, where practitioners censor themselves by dropping key words at the end of each sentence, e.g.
   BT: "We can all speak—"
   Roslan: "All our plays have been—"
   Sheila: "I can write anything I—" 
6. It is political. Manifesto traces the struggles of a group of artists as they come up against the machinery of the state, be it detention or censorship. But it also looks at ideology, guiding principles and convictions, and purpose, and what it means to be not simply a political actor but a political being.

Manifesto was, in that sense, an artistic manifestation of the set of principles that a group of artists in Singapore had set out to be united by. It is the sort of ambitious, unflinching, chaotic and confrontational art that artists here have struggled, for decades on end, to defend. 

The linear timeline in Manifesto is often interrupted and most of the actors play multiple roles and speak a hodgepodge of several languages (English, Chinese, Malay, Hokkien), which might take some time to get a firm handle on (the disorientation is very deliberate and the production does not hand-hold the inexperienced theatregoer).

But in a nutshell, a group of artist-activists come together in 1956, during the tumultuous development of a national identity in pre-independence Singapore. Their establishment of a company lays the path for another group of artist-activists in 1986, who are swept up in the McCarthyistic Marxist arrests of the late 1980s. In the present day, 2015-2016, artists try to make sense of the industry's dark history and grapple with the ghosts of their past, while in the future, 2024, questions of artistic and political succession in Singapore (Who will be the next MP? Who will be the next artistic director?) come to the fore, placed on equal footing. The characters are sometimes very thinly sketched out, with a few feeling less like people and more like devices to move the narrative forward and throw some dramatic tension into the mix, but the actors do an absolutely stunning job within the confines of their short sketches to flesh out as much as they can of their talking heads, particularly the characters who are composites of real-life artists and detainees.

But, dare I say it, I don't think Manifesto will be remembered for its lack of characterisation, but for what it managed to condense and portray in a very short period of time. 

Manifesto draws from TNS and Drama Box's previous work: they were pioneering groups in promoting forum theatre in Singapore, and detention without trial and political choice are large themes in productions such as Gemuk Girls (2008) and Model Citizens (2010). But I think this marks the first time that they have turned their focus so strongly to the Singaporean creator of art. This self-reflexivity ties in with a tide of artwork that has also put the Singapore artist in the spotlight – some in more powerful ways than others – such as Sonny Liew's graphic novel The Art Of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015), which reimagines what Singapore might have been like if Lim Chin Siong had taken the reins instead of Lee Kuan Yew; Toy Factory Production's Upstage (2015), a measured, careful tribute to the origins of Singapore's Chinese-language theatre; or (to a, well, much less effective extent) Nanyang – The Musical (2015), which looked at the lives of the Nanyang-style painters in Singapore in the 1930s-50s. Then there has also been a swell of productions that look at alternative histories and narratives that don't completely align with the 'official narrative' that the Singapore authorities are fond of using as the definitive Singapore history. That official narrative is a valid take on the country's past – as are many of other narratives, told from different perspectives. Teater Ekamatra's Geng Rebut Cabinet (GRC; 2015) and Wild Rice's Hotel (2015), as well as Tan Pin Pin's documentary about political exiles To Singapore, With Love (2013) are some instances of productions that interrogate the political narratives that are often taken as fact, rather than a matter of perspective.

Taken together, Manifesto fits in well with this movement of artwork that seeks to overturn historical and cultural amnesia in Singapore. And if not to overturn, perhaps to introduce a few cracks in the armour. It is very bald, and very ballsy, about its agenda to expose the inordinate struggles of art-making in Singapore, and its manifesto for the arts is in full, showy, obvious view. This, as opposed to the opacity of the state's manifesto, e.g. it promotes a certain brand of art, but not others, without explaining why. (Case in point: The MDA's R18 rating of Manifesto for 'mature content', with very little elaboration.) I don't think it proclaims that artists should get away with murder, but that the role of the artist is to provoke, to confront, to challenge, to delight, and to dismay, that the artist is as equally prone to bouts of debilitating humanity as the rest of us: spying on and betraying their peers, hands tied by bureaucracy, self-censoring, sometimes incredibly entitled and bratty. 

Manifesto ends on an ambivalent, ambiguous note. A stage/production manager and an actress-director shake hands, having decided that they will start their own theatre company with their own manifesto to abide by. Yes, we all think, this is it. This is the moment where the cycle begins anew and they can strike out on their own, and make a difference.

Or is it? Will the cycle just continue as it has before? Do artists hold on to their manifesto, or simply fall in line behind the state's unspoken manifesto? Will art ever matter – and matter enough – in Singapore? Have we already lost the war, with a public that is largely more concerned with what they view as more important, bread-and-butter issues? Does Manifesto only preach to the converted (the artists, the artsgoers, the arts community), and with its brief run in a tiny black box space, will it ever send ripples far enough to ever make an impact? 

I don't have the answers to these questions. But I was thinking about the communality of Singapore theatre in the 1960s, captured in Dr Quah Sy Ren's authoritative book in Chinese-language theatre in Singapore, as well as in Upstage, where groups and individuals would come together on a regular basis, break bread with each other, and work collectively to create art. It is this coming together that Manifesto pieces together from the ashes of friendships and working relationships torn apart by detention and betrayal. The act of creating Manifesto itself was the result of two groups with overlapping histories coming back together. I think it is this arts community that we must come together to nurture, to heal, and protect. That is our manifesto.

UPDATE:

Stray thoughts about the performers and the use of multimedia:

• So many clever touches from the use of film as both documentary and mockumentary, courtesy of a lot of great experimentation from Loo Zihan. I liked how the present-day performance artist Rumiko uses an iPhone the way one might use Snapchat or Periscope today, to do a 'live' feed on arts events. And of course the 'documentary' snippets that recreate the confessions done on public TV during the 1980s that were breathtakingly authentic. 
• There's a scene that actress Goh Guat Kian does as her character Siok Dee towards the end of the play, captured on film, that was quite gutting and that I found out later she had improvised, i.e. her improvisation done in rehearsal made the cut into the final film with next to no changes. Guat Kian, you are incredible.
• Also cried buckets during a scene where the inimitable Siti Khalijah, as the long-suffering actress Som, waiting for her husband to come home, ages through the decades. I know I wasn't the only one.
• I have a soft spot for forum theatre, and it was very pleasing to see it used as a practical, matter-of-fact way of resolving conflict and trouble-shooting. Kind of a small reclamation of the 10 years where funding to forum theatre was proscribed here.
• "Art is the end of the reviewer." Well, that's really—

The Shape of a Bird by Jean Tay

I thought I might start a new, informal series tagged "stream of consciousness" for my immediate (and raw) responses to plays after I've seen them. 

I caught Jean Tay's new play, The Shape of a Bird, at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival on January 16. It's a blend of actual history and fable in the vein of her recent work, Sisters – The Untold Stories of the Sisters Islands (2013), which revisits the infamous Sunny Ang murder case that took place at Sisters Islands; and Senang (2014), which draws parallels between Milton's Paradise Lost, the Chinese classic The Water Margin, and the fatal prison riots on Pulau Senang. Tay's recent fascination with how we reinterpret history through myth and metaphor is apparent, and she's also demonstrated a strong pull towards the use of puppetry; in Sisters, the actresses transformed simple lengths of printed fabric into living, breathing characters.

Bird is a spiritual sequel of sorts to the previous two plays, except this time Tay moves away from Singapore history to a story inspired by repression under China's Cultural Revolution, in a play blending censorship, oppression, familial bonds, fable and plenty of puppetry and object work. It's a tall order, and she has confessed in interviews that she believed the play to be her "impossible play", one incredibly difficult to stage. Essentially, a woman (Tan Kheng Hua) has been imprisoned due to her incendiary writings (which we find out later are children's books with a darker undercurrent), and she is separated from her 18-year-old daughter Ann (Jean Toh), who is learning to live without her. They live under the rule of a legion of Cicadas where there is only one official narrative and the rest are deemed subversive. There is also a mysterious prison warden-interrogator (Brendon Fernandez) and a possible love interest for Ann (Thomas Pang), both of whom are aligned with the Cicadas. The production is set against three white fabric screens, on which bursts of shadow puppetry are projected, and newspaper puppets flit across the stage.

This is an intriguing premise in a country where words are often denied due to the power they wield, but one sadly squandered. Tay seems to be more interested in poetics than politics, and her characters move about in a haze of repetitive moral dilemmas. Should they... Sign a false confession? Sleep with the enemy? Stop writing? Any propulsive action that takes the narrative forward is shoehorned in-between these repeated dilemmas, which means that any sort of emotional revelation is played on fast-forward and over in an instant, rid of all its potential impact. Director Mei Ann Teo curiously lengthens some heavy, repetitive scenes but skips over other emotional pivots (e.g. key revelations about Ann's family and a mysterious newspaper puppet that has been following her around), and young actors Jean Toh and Thomas Pang also falter in these emotionally charged moments, often reacting too quickly to what should have been a slow burn. Tay's stylised, lyrical prose works during some monologues but comes off as stilted and clumsy in other quick exchanges of dialogue.

Tay also takes a simplistic view of the power of the written word; her characters might very well have been yelling "the pen is mightier than the sword!" throughout the play. Instead of demonstrating the power of said words, she instead chooses for her characters to repeat the slogan "your words are powerful!" or "write your stories!" or "only you can tell your stories!", ironically depriving the slogan of any power whatsoever, because we have no idea what these words are, and why they would move the people to such an extent. It sometimes feels like a (unfortunately) diluted version of The Necessary Stage's Gemuk Girls (2008), which dealt with a similar context with great poignancy and precision – a photographer is detained by the Internal Security Department who try to force him to sign a false confession about his links with communism; it spans three generations within the same family and lays bare their struggles as they react to his incarceration. Gemuk Girls had a gutting specificity and political impulse that Bird lacks.

The problem with fantasy and myth is often how it can make itself relevant to reality. Audiences will quickly pick out metaphors that feel heavy-handed and obvious, but can also be alienated by metaphors that are too abstract to connect to everyday life. When I think of a cicada, I don't really think of much else. It's an insect a little like a cricket, that much I know, and at a stretch I would ponder how it only surfaces after many years underground. But the symbol of the cicada feels incongruent with the play. There's a missing anchor in here somewhere, and the play drifts around untethered the way its characters are forced fold invisible cicada origami, their fingers moving nimbly across empty air. Because we cannot witness what they are creating, we feel less for what is being destroyed. 

Sweetie Pie by Tagu Films

A few months ago, I wrote a personal response to the short film Sweetie Pie by Myanmar film-maker Sai Kong Kham of Tagu Films. The award-winning documentary outfit is based in Yangon. Full disclosure: They are good friends of mine.

---

When I was little, I loved visiting my grandfather in Malaysia. My grandparents lived in a large, crumbly house with fruit trees in the front yard and, occasionally, an ostrich in the back – all curiosities to us Singaporean city kids. Our grandfather adored us. Whenever we visited it was as if a small toy factory had exploded in his living room. He once bought us a woolly toy dog that could bark – and do back flips. My six-year-old self had never seen anything like it. We clambered onto his lap and made him laugh.

It was not till many years later that I realised my grandfather had been a cantankerous old man. He despised being wrong. He yelled at everyone: his wife, his children, his nurses. And he eventually died, relatively young, from lung failure after blithely chain smoking for most of his life.

These are the fragments of my childhood that I remembered when I watched Sai Kong Kham’s short film Sweetie Pie for the first time two years ago. The old man, sitting still in his favourite chair, with his high, hacking cough; his toddler grandson, the titular Sweetie Pie, crashing through the house, cutting up a banana with a CD and then trying to ride a bicycle indoors. The old man says, “this is my favourite grandchild,” and then realises he’s forgotten his grandson’s name. His terms of endearment, addressed to the silent but hyperactive child, are deliciously foul.

Sai told me that he came across this family by chance. The old tailor, who was 86 at the time, had been an acquaintance of his mentor at the Yangon Film School. The initial idea had been to film a lengthy sit-down interview with the tailor, but the footage turned out to be very dull. The three-year-old boy had always been in the family home, but because of the nature of the “serious” interview, he’d been shooed outside the house. Yet the old man kept calling to his young grandson throughout the interview, and Sai lit on the idea of filming them together. He got rid of the static, formal interview and started from scratch.

In Sweetie Pie, Sai opts for clear binaries and clean juxtapositions and the symbolism can be slightly heavy-handed: the old man sits cloistered away in a dark house, but his young grandson is always framed against the light. But all the elements that have become trademarks of his film-making: the keen observational work, the matter-of-fact visual storytelling, the unobtrusive camera capturing an interviewee’s most relaxed moments – they are all there. His camera work is sharp and poetic at turns, lingering just long enough on a surprising moment or a gorgeous panorama. You see glimpses of this in Sweetie Pie: our perspective shifts to see the house from above, through the spokes of a ceiling fan; and then Sai gives us a tender close-up of the old man, barely breathing, as his grandson tries to wake him from an afternoon nap.

Sai has turned out to have extraordinary chemistry with children. In his award-winning short documentary This Land Is Our Land, about land grabs across Myanmar, the film concludes with a group of excited children telling the camera what they want to be when they grow up – “a cattle herder!” one yells, “firewood collector!”, interrupts another. It is a portrait of rural Myanmar both amusing and deeply affecting, and that same childhood innocence is present in Sai’s earliest film work.

In Sweetie Pie, one realises that it is only the very young and very old – the extremes of mortality – who can get away with anything. The old man threatens his uncomprehending grandson: “I’ll give you a good beating!” but of course, he doesn’t. The old man died a year after the film was made. The seven-minute film compresses an enormous amount of emotion into its short run time. How will this little boy remember his grandfather when he is older? Sweet-tempered, but with a salty vocabulary? Will he even remember these interactions at all?

My family acquired a video camera when I was about seven years old, and my grandfather died three years later, when I was ten. The grainy footage of my grandfather, my sister in his lap, feeding the both of us the best cookies, has helped shade in the gaps in my memory. In the same way, Sweetie Pie crosses from the realm of clinical observer into the living, pulsing world of memory. I’m glad Sai has stuck to that brand of documentary, one that carefully marries fact and emotion. It hits that rare sweet spot.

Originally published here on October 14, 2015 as 'Sweetie Pie: blending documentary and memory'.