Four Documentaries Banned from 2008 Singapore Film Festival
April 8th, 2008 by Andre Soares
Screendaily reports that four documentaries scheduled for the 21st Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF), which kicked off on April 4, have been banned by local censors.
According to the report, two of the documentaries — Arab-American director Bassam Haddad’s Arabs and Terrorism, about opposing views on political terror, and Mano Khalil’s David the Tolhildan, which follows the son of a former Swiss Federal Supreme Court president who joined the Kurdish armed independence movement PKK — "were ‘disallowed’ on account of their sympathetic portrayal of allegedly terrorist organizations."
"Films which portray terrorist organizations in a positive light by lending support and voice to justify their cause through violence are disallowed under the film classification guidelines," said Amy Chua, chairman of Singapore’s Board of Film Censors.
The other two banned documentaries were Ryuichi Hiroki’s Bakushi, a portrayal of kinbaku, described as "the Japanese practice of tying up women in elaborate knots before proceeding to S&M stage shows," and Parvez Sharma’s A Jihad for Love (above), in which a gay Muslim filmmaker talks to openly gay and lesbian Muslims in 12 countries.
SIFF festival director Philip Cheah told Screendaily that "in the early days of silent film, D. W. Griffith made the epic Intolerance. Now that we have color and sound, we unfortunately still have intolerance on a more grand epic scale."
The Tuesday screening of Hiner Saleem’s Dol – The Valley of Tambourines, a depiction of the Turkish-Kurdish conflict at the Iran and Iraq border, will apparently go on as that film received a NC16 rating.
Technorati Tags: Arabs and Terrorism, A Jihad for Love, Parvez Sharma, Singapore Film Festival, The Valley of Tambourines
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2 Responses to “Four Documentaries Banned from 2008 Singapore Film Festival”
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Censorship is alive and well in 2008. Apparently, we still need idiots to tell us what we can see and hear. Ah, I feel much more protected now.
And I turned up there, refunded my tickets because I refused to watch some film they put up to appease me.
Apparently, Singapore’s attempt to unconvincingly portray itself as a booming new arts scene is tainted with doses of hypocrisy.
Don’t believe a word they say, you artsy people! Don’t feed their delusions.