Wonderland, A Year Of No Significance picked for Golden Rooster
Two made-in-Singapore movies have been selected to take part in the China Golden Rooster & Hundred Flowers Film Festival.
Chai Yee Wei’s Wonderland and Kelvin Tong’s A Year Of No Significance will be screened as part of the China Golden Rooster Chinese-language Film Section, which highlights Sinophone films from beyond mainland China.
Both the local film-makers as well as the movies’ stars – Mark Lee, who headlines Wonderland, and A Year Of No Significance’s leading man Peter Yu – will attend the film festival in Xiamen, China, on Nov 13. Yu also plays a major role in Wonderland and will promote both films at the festival, which runs from Nov 11 to 24.
Both are period films set in Singapore. Wonderland, set in the 1980s, revolves around a lonely and illiterate man (Lee), who asks his neighbour (Yu) to help him pen letters to his daughter studying in America. A Year Of No Significance charts the mid-life crisis of a Chinese-educated architect (Yu) in 1979.
Yu told local Chinese news outlet Lianhe Zaobao in an interview published on Nov 7: “I first heard from Kelvin that A Year Of No Significance will be taking part in the film festival. The next day, I got a call from Yee Wei who said Wonderland has also been selected. I’m really happy. This is a great honour.”
The 56-year-old is keen to look for work opportunities in China.
He added: “I’ve always wanted to develop my career there and seek out acting roles, but I’m quite a passive person. Going to Xiamen gives me a good chance to meet and speak with film-makers there. The Chinese film industry is massive with very high-quality actors and productions. Hopefully, I can make some gains there.”
Lee, 56, who previously attended Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards as a Best Actor nominee for drag queen comedy Number 1 (2020), said: “I learnt a lot there. Hopefully, I can expand my horizons through taking part in this film festival and improve myself as someone working in the world of film. Whether there are any opportunities in China – that’s up to fate.”
Chai, 48, is heartened by the warm reception Wonderland has received. Its box-office gross in Singapore is around $480,000, while its earnings in Malaysia were around $300,000.
He told Zaobao: “It’s encouraging that the film has been selected to take part in a festival in China. It puts my heart at ease. And we’ve also found an interested distributor in China, which makes me really glad.”
This year, the Chinese-language film section spans 23 old and new movies from Taiwan, Macau, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore. Some of the selections include 4K restorations of Taiwanese auteur Hou Hsiao-hsien’s classics A City Of Sadness (1989) and Millennium Mambo (2001), Hong Kong actress Sandra Ng’s movie Love Lies (2024) and the Malaysia-Singapore-France joint production Oasis Of Now (2023).
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