A building becomes a living painting. The concrete homes and contradicting soundscapes frame the lives of an expatriate community.
FESTIVALS
: Viennale Int'l Film Festival, Austria 2009
: Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Germany 2009
: Hong Kong Int'l Film Festival, Hong Kong 2009 [The Avant Garde]
: Berlin Int'l Film Festival, Germany 2009 [Forum Expanded]
: Int'l Film Festival Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 2009 [Tiger Competition]
: Voted 2008 Canada's Top Ten Short Films of the year (www.topten.ca)
: Mar Del Plata Int'l Film Festival, Argentina, 2008 [WINNER-Best Int'l Short Film prize]
: Toronto Int'l Film Festival, Canada, 2008 [WINNER-Best Canadian Short Film prize]
: Smithsonian Institutes' HIRSHHORN MUSEUM, Washington D.C., USA, Apr-Aug 2010
INTERVIEW - Tiger Competition: 2009 International Film Festival Rotterdam
"... Observational cinema at its extreme ..."
- Alex Rogalski, Shortcuts programmer
Toronto International Film Festival 2008 on Block B
"... a gorgeously formalist portrait of humanity with one masterfully restrained long shot ..."
- Gisèle Gordon, jury selection of Block B, 2009 Canada's Top 10 Shorts Films
"... audacious ... simple, graphic, hypnotic - this is an achievement of bringing cinema to its bare essentials."
- Jury, 2008 Toronto International Film Festival
Rotterdam Int'l Film Festival programmer Peter van Hoof,
filmmakers Louise Archambault and Min Sook Lee.
Block B, winner of the Best Canadian Short Film prize, 2008
"Block B observes its subject from a distance, in one long shot, mirroring the city’s disparate cultural enclaves.
The monumental scale contrasts with the intimate real-life fictions that spill out of the monolithic structure
in expressions of resilience and hope."
- Andréa Picard, programmer
2008 Toronto Int'l Film Festival
"... startling perspective ... stunning ... highly memorable tours of physical spaces ..."
- Jason Anderson, Eye Weekly, Sept 2008 on Block B
director / producer~ chris chong chan fui
sound artist~ yasuhiro morinaga
editor / post-production supervisor~ lee chatametikool
re-recording sound mixer~ akritchalerm kalayanamitr
cinematographer~ y. h. cheong
art director~ yee i-lann
line producer~ javine wong
associate producer~ pierre laburthe
writer~ toni kasim
DIRECTOR'S NOTES
chris chong chan fui
The area of Brickfields is the setting of Block B. This is a place where the sounds of the azan from the mosque compete with the chimes rising from the pooja and the bells of the Hindu temples. In effect, this mélange of sounds mimic the disparate voices that comprise of Malaysia’s own religious complexities and insecurities. Brickfields is also a community that encompasses a population that is transient with expatriate Indians working in Kuala Lumpur. Block B is about the women who live in this block, who are uprooted and move for their husband's work. The wives rarely leave the apartment compound. Only venturing outside with their husbands, and sometimes with their neighbours. Usually they visit others within the same floor, or from the floors above and below. But they rarely venture far.
It’s a community within a community. A detail within a detail. Connected, but distant. We are never given the luxury of seeing a face. We too are at arm’s length from the emotions we expect from the projection. We have to find another way to connect with the picture.
With moving details within this unmovable cement building, the view initially becomes an overwhelming mass of squares and rectangles. Slots and pockets of closed-off lines, linked to other grids and to other squared-off shapes. Much time is required to watch the many details of this singular shot. Moreover, much time is required to get a small sense of how the community walks through these lines.
SOUND ARTIST'S NOTES
yasuhiro morinaga, Tokyo
Designing sound for Block B is not only about creating a particular atmosphere or soundscape of an environment but it's also about expressing the non-conventional form of new-media aethetics. The sound for Block B is created not only by the human community and from what you see visually in the frame, but also other natural acoustic communities such as birds and insects around the compound. Therefore, the audience perceives the sounds off-screen and in-screen. In this film, the footstep sounds you hear in the counterpoint (30 second black transition in the middle of the film) from day to night, gives the audience the feeling that humans and insects are all alive on the ground. These become like 'footsteps' of their another presence.
In Block B, there are two parts in the main sounds. One is in-sync sounds and another is non-sync sounds. In-sync sounds create the reality of the apartment block. While the non-sync sounds can direct the audience through the semiotics in order for them to think and find codes to understand the particular movements in the environment.
By focusing on what you hear in reality, you perceive sounds and recognize what the sounds are. There are many sounds around the actual environment, but your brain picks up something automatically; a Cocktail Party Effect from over a dozen sounds. In this film, by blending dialogue into the environmental sounds, the audience can perceive, hear and feel the action, but also hear the environment as a whole to provide realism.
