Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen

Happy New Year, everyone!

A view of the Times Square New Year fireworks from our friends Chris and Julie’s roof. Silhouetted against the fireworks is 55 Central Park West, aka ‘Spook Central’ in the Ghostbusters movie.

Slightly belated greetings to our far-flung friends and family: we know it’s a tad impersonal to have directed you to our blog rather than have penned individualized New Year’s greetings to each of you, but as fellow overworked and stressed out adults, we’re sure you understand. Pai seh!

Here are some snaps of our Christmas/New Year festivities:

This is Yen with our fellow Singaporean expat buddies Eddie and George having traditional Christmas makan of bryani, brinjal bhartha and curry fish patties. Turkey? Pooi!

And here’s a post-New Year’s dinner pose with Jennifer and Lucas, who’ve been extremely kind in looking after our apartment and car whenever we’re on another jaunt outside NYC.

And the next morning: traditional New Year’s Day dim sum at Ping’s in Elmhurst, Queens, possibly the best in New York. Dim sum not traditional, you say? Then explain the crowds!

For those of you we didn’t get a chance to meet, 2006 has been a fruitful, if insane year for us. We know everyone says that, but we think that in our case, it’s justified.

What took up all of our time this year was, of course, the premiere of our film, Singapore Dreaming.

Now that we’re back in New York again, after months in Singapore and on the road, it’s a little weird to imagine that at this time last year, we were scrambling like mad to wind up the editing, clear the subtitles, commence the soundtrack scoring and sound design, set up the digital intermediate workflow and even arrange the poster photo shoot.

And now the wild ride is more or less over and we’re getting our lives back again. (For a glimpse at all the hoo-ha, have a trawl through the Singapore Dreaming blog.)

The film is still very much alive, of course.

Our DVD is out in Singapore at all good retailers, and by all accounts selling decently (for our friends overseas, click here to buy it online), and Golden Village has told us we’ve even got requests for private theatrical bookings into the new year.

Meanwhile, in a few weeks, SGD will be playing in the Goteborg International Film Festival (the top Nordic film fest), in the market at Berlin, and we’ve also been nominated for Best Asean Film at the Bangkok International Film Festival. (Though with Thaksingate going on in Thailand, I doubt a Singaporean film will win…) We’ve also been swamped by other festival invitations and requests to screen overseas. However, while we’re deeply promiscuous and would love to screen everywhere, our international sales agent is now handling our overseas rollout strategy. We’ve forwarded all your queries to them, and hopefully you’ll get a chance to see the film – and us! – sometime soon.

The whole experience has been extremely humbling, of course. We have a lot of people for whose support we’re very, very grateful. Our great cast and crew in Singapore and New York, our supportive investors, all the TalkingCock supporters, the very generous jury at the San Sebastian International Film Festival, the hardworking folks at Golden Village, our friends and family, and so many others. A big thank you also to all the audiences who’ve been emailing us. We’re deeply touched that you’d take time out to tell us how the film made you feel – we know it’s a big deal for us famously reticent Singaporeans. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

We’d also like to thank People Like Us, OogaChaga and everyone who came to see (even those who didn’t manage to get in) TalkingCock in Parliament, our maiden live event, which we organized in August as part of InDigNation 2006. It was very fun, the energy was fantastic, and we definitely want to do it again! When? Now, now. That would be telling…

And so now we’re into 2007, and the big question looming for us is: what next?

Well, we have several scripts in development, and we’d like to move swiftly onto the next film, but the state of independent filmmaking economics worldwide is in a real mess. Unless we can get our films out to a mass audience and not just the Arthouse Taliban, and without having to sacrifice 95% of our revenues to middlemen, it’s just not a sustainable career.

We’ve been relatively lucky box office-wise with Singapore Dreaming (we did as well as some Hollywood releases in Singapore and were the top grossing non-MediaCorp Raintree/Jack Neo Singapore flick for the past 8 years), but personally, we don’t have much to show for it: our Montblanc New Screenwriters Award prize money went straight to reducing the debts we’ve accrued over the years trying to make our dreams work rather than settling for a desk job.

So while we love filmmaking, we also recognize that there’s a massive financial opportunity cost. (Especially since Yen had to go on no pay leave and Colin had to turn down various paying projects to concentrate on the film.) As we get older, we wonder how long we can keep going like this, without striking the lottery. All you bright eyed and bushy tailed film students, you might want to take notes…

But you know, for all the downsides, we did have heaps of fun and also learned a lot of stuff that we can’t wait to try out on our next project. It’s a cliché, but maybe poverty is just the price one has to pay to chase one’s interests.

So for the moment, 2007 looks like a year of recuperation and research – plugging away at our day jobs to pay the bills, while quietly trying to plan our next project. As the other entries in our blog indicate, China is figuring more and more prominently on our horizon. We’ve met some really great people (we think the new generation of Chinese are scarily clever) and some extremely interesting propositions are being made to us, but you just can’t predict how things will turn out, can you?

Whatever happens, we really hope you’ll come along with us on our ride.

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Here’s wishing you all the very best for 2007,

Yen Yen and Colin
Brooklyn, New York

P.S. We received this New Year’s greeting from another friend which we thought was just too good and honest not to share!

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