Singapore '90s fever

Nostalgia for the 1990s is being stoked this weekend in the Singapore Film Festival at Bangkok’s SFX the Emporium, which will feature “Ilo Ilo”, set during the 1997 financial crisis, and “That Girl in Pinafore”, a coming-of-age tale about schoolboys who enter a music contest at the height of the early ’90s xin yao folk-music craze.

Up first at 7 tonight is “That Girl in Pinafore” by Chai Yee Wei. Set in 1992 – the year the island republic banned chewing gum – the story has four young pranksters who ought to be concentrating on their school exams but would rather think about girls. While one of the guys chases a girl against her parents’ wishes, the boys enter a music contest and become the backing band to a colourful trio of female singers, which includes twin sisters. “That Girl” also screens at 4 tomorrow. 

The other film, “Ilo Ilo”, is the first Singaporean entry to win a prize at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. It won the Camera d’Or for debuting director Anthony Chen, who based the film on his own boyhood in the late ’90s. It’s the story of a Filipina maid (Angeli Bayani) who goes to work for a middle-class Singaporean family. She struggles to bond with the family’s bratty boy and please the domineering pregnant matriarch (Yeo Yann Yann) while the father has been thrown out of work, but is keeping that a secret. It screens at 7 tomorrow and Sunday.

Tickets are free and can be collected in the cinema lobby 30 minutes before the screening. For more details, visit SFCinemaCity.com.