SINGAPORE — There is something different about Utter 2016, an annual Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) initiative that adapts Singaporean literature for different mediums such as film. The festival announced yesterday that it has partnered Sinema Media to bring four young emerging directors — Sufyan Sam’an, Jacky Lee, Jonathan Choo and D Vel Murugan — together to co-direct a feature-length film.

Titled One Hour to Daylight, this 75-minute social drama differs from the previous five editions of Utter, which presented short films and animation shorts. This year’s film is loosely based on the “Curry Dispute”, which occurred in 2011 when a Chinese immigrant family took offence with the smell of their Indian neighbours cooking curry, creating a nationwide movement to “cook curry” in protest. SWF festival director Yeow Kai Chai explained this deliberate change: “We really wanted to do a feature-length film this time. Sinema Media’s proposal was very topical and quite clearly representative of Singapore in terms of language, community and hot-topic issues. Also, they took one text from each of the different languages, which was interesting.”

The subplots of the film are adapted from four local short stories written by prominent Singaporean writers in their native languages. The short stories are Alyssa by Kanagalatha (Latha); We’d Wanted to Rob a Bank by Chia Hwee Pheng (Xi Ni Er); Harmonious Residences by Jeremy Tiang, and Per(anti) Mimpi 1.0 by Siti Aisyah Binte Mohamed Salim. Characters in the film are portrayed by both homegrown and overseas actors such as Hatta Said and Joann Wu.

“We knew we had to have a good mix of directors who can represent the stories. We proposed a couple of directors to the National Arts Council, which looked at their CVs and their works. The most difficult part was to find a Tamil director. There are only two in Singapore,” shared Nicholas Chee from Sinema Media, who shortlisted the four young directors to helm this project.

Choo is best known for his recent win as Best Director at the National Youth Film Awards this year for his thesis film Han, a moving portrayal of grief and loss within families. As for Sufyan, known thus far for directing Chinese short films and is known for his very unique perspective, he is described by Chee as “someone he was always wanted to work with”. Murugan was recommended by director Don Aravind, who worked on Utter 2014, and has been doing television broadcast focusing on dramas for close to 10 years. Jacky Lee was “parachuted in at the last minute” to replace another director whose name Sinema declined to reveal.

“I was in reservist when Nicholas called me. Everybody knows I was actually on a six-month break prior to this because I was a little bit sick of films,” admitted Lee. “But when the script came, coincidentally, I kind of identified with the main characters, because my dad is a renovation contractor so I grew up with immigrant workers from China, Myanmar, Bangladesh and all. I never quite understood all this xenophobia — it never existed in my family because every Chinese New Year they would come over for dinner with my family, and we treated them like they were our family. (The movie) felt like something I could do and it seemed like a good chance to come back to work.”

For more in-depth insights from these young directorial talents, there will be post-screening dialogues following the film’s premiere screenings next week.

“For Writer’s Fest, as you can tell from this year and last year, we want to merge the different art forms and push the different potentials of texts. Instead of just treating the text as a standalone, we got the directors and the screenwriters to have their input and, from the film, we can see how they have changed the context,” Yeow surmised. REENA DEVI

One Hour to Daylight (NC16) will run on Sept 20 and 25 at Golden Village, Suntec City, Hall 2 at 9pm. Tickets are available on the GV website and box office from today.