A murkier Films Act

A murkier Films Act

In 1998, a blanket ban on political films came into existence and 10 years later, the PAP government began to “rethink”.

With that, Parliament passed a bill yesterday (23 March 2009) to amend the Films Act - but in a way that it confounded more than clarified certain perspectives.

Last year, some had already sensed something amiss when it was revealed that the Act would be liberalised in stages, with a dash of new laws and a preview of what they may comprise.

Several prominent netizens then called for a total, one-off repeal of Section 33 of the Films Act instead.

Choo Zheng Xi, editor of The Online Citizen, could not be more than spot on when he said in December 2008, during an interview with Channel NewsAsia, that it would be “messy legislation” if repealed in stages.

Indeed, it turned out to be.

The legislation is now official and opened frontiers that were previously restricted - but three new areas are engulfed in obscurity.

1) Filming of illegal events become illegal

The principle of law states that a person is “innocent until proven guilty”.

After the police arrest people who may have broken the law, the judiciary is ultimately the body that delivers the verdict.

However, filmmakers may have to play the role of a judge to know if an event is illegal or otherwise.

Should a filmmaker be convicted but the defendant(s) are acquitted, what would happen remains curious.

Should the defendant(s) be pronounced guilty, the filmmaker would probably be left to suffer sleepless nights.

2) No animation, please

“Animation” is defined as a “rapid display of a sequence of images or positions in order to create an illusion of movement”.

With political films not allowed to display animations, the government was in effect not liberalising films but Microsoft Powerpoint presentations.

In the first place, Powerpoint presentations were never banned and Workers’ Party members have used it for the party’s closed-door events.

Even then, one wonders if switches between various slides in such presentations would be termed as “movements”.

While on the topic of “new media” in his National Day Rally speech last year, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was waving a video camera - without realising that one is not even needed to generate static images.

3) “Partisan” or “non-factual” films are “no-no”

Are manifestos of political parties - one of the items listed by the Straits Times - not partisan?

Perhaps the PAP has to include footage of the opposition in its own films or it would be deemed to be making partisan films.

Then again, the PAP is of the opinion that opposition’s mantra is never factual, case in point being the WP’s “time bombs” and “poisons” in its manifesto.

Hence, it is tantamount to saying that the opposition can never make any political films without contravening the law - or they could try to make one extolling the PAP.

All in all, there are liberalised aspects that defeat a blanket ban but the progress could have been better - and less ambiguous.

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