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About Eric Khoo
 Singaporean filmmaker Eric Khoo was born in 1965 and was
from an early age immersed into the world of cinema. He attended
City Art Institute in Sydney, Australia where he studied
cinematography. Starting out with short films, Khoo has directed
When the Magic Dies (1985), Barbie Digs Joe (1990), August
(1991), Carcass (1992), Symphony 92.4 (1993), Pain (1994), and
Home Video (2000), a number of which have won prizes and been
screened at festivals overseas. He has also produced and/or
directed made-for-television film Drive: Sex, Lies and…, music
videos, and television advertisements. Khoo is perhaps best
known for his three critically acclaimed feature films that have
been invited to festivals all over the world: Mee Pok Man
(1995), 12 Storeys (1995), and Be With Me (2005). Mee Pok Man
won prizes not only in Singapore, but also in Fukuoka and Pusan.
12 Storeys (1997) won him the Federation of International Film
Critics (FIPRESCI) Award, the UOB Young Cinema Award at the 10th
Singapore International Film Festival, and the Golden Maile
Award for Best Picture at the 17th Hawaii International Films
Festival. It was also the first Singapore film officially to be
invited to participate at the Cannes Film Festival. Be With Me
played as the opening film of the Directors’ Fortnight at the
Cannes Film Festival and has met with rave reviews.
As an executive producer running his own production firm Zhao
Wei Films Pte Ltd, Khoo has worked on Liang Po Po – The Movie
(1999), Stories About Love (2000), One Leg Kicking (2001), 15
(2003), Zombie Dogs (2004), and the made-for-television
mini-series Drive and Seventh Month.
In 1997, Khoo received the Singapore National Arts Council’s
Young Artist Award for film. In 1998, he was profiled by
Asiaweek as one of 25 exceptional Asian trendmakers for his
influence on film and television. A year after, Asiaweek listed
him as one of the leaders for the millennium. In the same year,
he received the Singapore Youth Award (Individual) in
recognition of his dedication to filmmaking and contributions to
society.
Khoo’s films tend to explore a set of hard-hitting themes,
including a sense of alienation in contemporary Singapore,
nostalgia for a more humane past, and the centrality and
complexity of human sexuality. Influenced by Martin Scorcese’s
Taxi Driver, Khoo often features a complex anti-hero as the
protagonist of his films: the lonely old man who commits suicide
on his birthday in Symphony 92.4, the self-abusive job-searcher
in Pain who tortures and kills an Indian shop-keeper, the
pork-seller in Carcass who takes comfort in television dramas
and regular sex with a prostitute, the outcast necrophilic
hawker in Mee Pok Man, the model citizen who breaks down in 12
Storeys – all dysfunctional individuals struggling to cope in a
rigid and yet fast-paced society administered by harsh norms,
rules, and regulations. Often, Khoo captures grittier, less
sanitized images of Singapore’s underbelly that contrast starkly
with the official glossy-postcard projections of tourism-hungry
Singapore. And yet, Khoo possesses the remarkable ability to
invest tremendous aesthetic beauty into the dilapidated back
alleys, crumbling old buildings, and seedy prostitute dens,
without trivializing them.
In many ways, Khoo is a public intellectual who, through his
films, raises a critical awareness – uncomfortable as this may
be – among his audience of their own conditions of existence, or
at least of other people’s conditions of existence that they
perhaps may be partly responsible for. Eric Khoo will be a
pivotal name in any history of Singapore film waiting to be
written in time to come.
Kenneth Paul Tan
Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore
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