Extract from Dr Kenneth Paul Tan, "About Eric Khoo" in Inaugural Forum on Asian Cinema, available on Asian Film Archive website:
"Khoo's films explore a set of hard-hitting themes, including a sense of alienation in contemporary Singapore, nostalgia for a humane past, and the centrality and complexity of human sexuality. Influenced by Martin Scorsese'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 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. Khoo usually captures grittier, less sanitized images of Singapore's underbelly that contrast starkly with the projected images of tourism-hungry Singapore. 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 among his audience of their own conditions of existence, or at least of other people's conditions of existence."
A full chapter on Eric Khoo's films, "The Tragedy of the Heartlands in the Films of Eric Khoo", is included in Kenneth Paul Tan, Cinema and Television in Singapore: Resistance in One Dimension (Leiden: Brill, March 2008)
Khoo is famous for his three critically acclaimed feature films that have been screened at film festivals all over the world: Mee Pok Man (1995), 12 Storeys (1997), and Be with Me (2005). Mee Pok Man won prizes in Singapore, Fukuoka and Pusan. 12 Storeys 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. 12 Storeys was also the first Singapore film to be invited to take part in the Cannes Film Festival. Be with Me played as the opening film of the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.
In 2007, Eric received the highest arts honour, the Cultural Medallion from the National Arts Council and directed his 4th feature, My Magic with the Cultural Medallion grant. The film became the first Singaporean feature selected for main competition at Cannes 2008.
Be With Me
