Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Hot Flash

Director – Thea Hollatz – 2019 – Canada – 10m

*****

From the Annecy 2020 Online Animation Festival

Suffering from a hot flash just before she’s due to go on air, weatherwoman Ace Naismith (voice: Christine Horne) desperately employs the cooling fan in her dressing room to blow cool air on her face, under her boobs and up her dress in a desperate attempt to cool down. A moment of embarrassment ensues as she’s interrupted by P.A. Natalie Van Damme (Grace Glowicki) who tells her, Don wants you to talk about paragliders.

In the studio, under the lights against greenscreen, Ace is visibly suffering. Don (Tony Nappo) enters, but she can’t talk to him about the paraglider thing because he’s jugging three conversations on three different devices, one of which could be with his wife. So she delivers the report to camera on the incoming ice storm and then, paragliders, a reminder of warmer weather which she, in her current hot state, could well do without.

Her quest to cool down continues – sitting in the car park with the car door open while a male colleague walks past, warmly wrapped against the freezing cold. She drives home, rushes upstairs, rips of her clothes opens the window, cools down.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Wet Season
(Redai Yu,
热带雨)

Director – Anthony Chen – 2019 – Singapore – 103m

****1/2

A Singaporean schoolboy becomes obsessed with his Mandarin language teacher – from the BFI London Film Festival and the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) 2019.

It seems to be constantly raining in urban Singapore. Ling (Yeo Yann Yann) is forever sitting in her parked car injecting insulin. She has a job teaching Mandarin to a class in a local boys secondary school. Half a dozen of them are such poor students that she sets up a remedial class after hours to get them up to speed, but while they’re made to attend, they really aren’t interested. With one exception.

Wei-lun (Koh Jia Ler) will be in trouble with his parents if he doesn’t do well in Mandarin. As the other boys bunk off the remedial class with the slightest excuse, it pretty quickly develops into Ling teaching Wei-lun on a one-on-one basis. He doesn’t live that far from her home, so she often gives him a ride home in the car afterwards, unaware that behind her back he has for a long time been taking pictures of her with his mobile phone in class.

Ling has been trying to have a baby with her husband Andrew (Christopher Lee Ming-Shun) for some eight years.… Read the rest