Of useful ghosts and all-girls school

By Brontë H. Lacsamana, Reporter

FOR THIS edition of the QCinema International Film Festival, BusinessWorld was able to catch the winning films of two of the festival’s competition categories: Thai film A Useful Ghost by Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke, winner of Asian Next Wave, and Singaporean film Amoeba by Siyou Tan, winner of New Horizons. The 3rd category, RainbowQC for LGBTQ films was won by Diego Céspedes’ The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo.

Here are the reviews for these two films:

A USEFUL GHOST
Directed by Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke

A Useful Ghost took home the Grand Prix at Cannes Critics’ Week earlier this year, and it’s clear why it was the winning representative of the new wave of Asian filmmaking in QCinema. It tells the story of a wife’s spirit reincarnated as a vacuum cleaner — and gets deeper and crazier from there.

Films that are an intersection of many things don’t often work, but this one does, all while making the audience laugh. Extreme spirituality is made mundane, amid the dust that floats and settles from monuments to culture and memory felled for profit. Some characters represent defiant queerness and otherness, knocked to the wayside, which must be picked up so they are not forgotten.

Ghost stories in Southeast Asia are always potent, and this film paints the return of the wronged, restless, and unresolved as an act of protest — until these very ghosts are used to serve the self-interests of the living. Given all these threads, it’s amazing that A Useful Ghost executes them all so well, making a perfect storm where a comedy of love with inanimate objects ramps up into Thailand’s most incisive epic about class consciousness, historical revisionism, and the radical potential of ghosts.

AMOEBA
Directed by Siyou Tan

Amoeba is the prime example of a personal debut film done beautifully, so it’s fitting this won in QCinema’s New Horizons program. The director herself came from a rigid all-girls school in Singapore, and anyone who has experienced a similar setting would immediately take a liking to this film, which depicts the suffocating, repressive nonsense forced on girls at a young age.

Going beyond mere teenage rebellion, this film is also a razor-sharp criticism of how Singapore has birthed a nation of people who simply obey and take pride without questioning a thing. With four funny and endearing girls at the center of the story, Tan is able to channel layers upon layers of frustrations, grounded in these girls’ juvenile obsession with triad gangs and a history of their country built on the backs of fishermen and workers from villages.

Through Amoeba, teen insecurities, blossoming sapphic feelings, and struggles with growing up all parallel Singapore’s own delusion, stuck in a superficial aquarium of its own making. It’s like a wrecking ball, able to bust the squeaky-clean image of a people, long thought to be a monolith of rule-followers and career-men and women. Ultimately a wonderful queer story, coming-of-age, and heartfelt middle finger to the establishment. — Brontë H. Lacsamana