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Singapore FILM IN SINGAPORE: THE RECONSTRUCTION OF A FILM INDUSTRYStudio Production of Film in SingaporeThe first Singapore film, The Immigrant (Xin Ke, 1926) was produced by Liu Peh Jing, who wanted to make films for the Chinese immigrant population in Singapore. Two years before, Runme Shaw arrived in Singapore from Shanghai to set up the Hai Seng Company, which later became the Shaw Organisation, one of the two exhibition giants in Singapore. The first Malay feature film, Laila Majnun (1933), was produced in Singapore by the Montilal Chemical Company of Bombay and directed by B.S. Rajhans. The success of this film convinced the Shaw Brothers to enter Malay film production in 1940 to cater to the expanding markets in Malaya and Indonesia. Their first film was Pearl (Mutiara, 1940), a comedy about a fisherman who finds a giant pearl. Malay Film Productions Limited, under the Shaw Brothers, went on to make over 300 Malay-language films. Their greatest discovery was singer, actor, director, writer, composer, P. Ramlee, who first appeared in films in the late 1940s and became the company's first Malay director with Penarik Becak (The Trishaw Puller, 1955), and who scored smash-hit after smash-hit at the box office and at the regional film festivals in Asia in the 1950s and 1960s. The second exhibition giant, Cathay Organisation, was set up by Loke Wan Tho in 1935... |
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