Cinema of Singapore

Cinema of Singapore
Golden Village at VivoCity, Singapore
No. of screens	187 (2011)
• Per capita	3.9 per 100,000 (2011)
Produced feature films (2011)
Fictional	14
Animated	1
Documentary	-
Number of admissions (2011)
Total	22,125,200
• Per capita	4.5 (2010)
Gross box office (2011)
Total	SGD 189 million
National films	SGD 9.24 million (4.9%)

Despite having a flourishing Chinese and Malay film industry in the 1950s and 1960s, Singapore's film industry declined after independence in 1965. There were a few films that featured Singaporean actors and were set in Singapore, including Saint Jack and They Call Her Cleopatra Wong. However, most of these were not released in Singapore and cannot be labelled as truly Singaporean productions.

The first fully Singapore funded film came in 1991's Medium Rare, which was based on a real-life local cult killer, Adrian Lim, who was hanged in 1988 for murder. Although it cost over S$2 million in production, the film performed dismally at the box office. The film took in merely S$130,000 locally but broke the ice for the next coming Singapore movie, Bugis Street, which was released in 1995. Bugis Street was a gaudy film about the famous sleazy district where transvestites and transsexuals were found. Both Medium Rare and Bugis Street were directed by non Singaporeans. The same year saw the release of Mee Pok Man, the first full-length film made by an independent Singaporean filmmaker, Eric Khoo, on a tight budget of S$100,000. Concerning a lonely noodle seller who falls for a prostitute, Mee Pok Man earned much critical accolade worldwide and encouraged more experimental, independent filmmaking in the nation.

Army Daze, made in 1996, took a humorous look at Singapore's national service, and turned in high profits at the box office.

In 1997 came another Eric Khoo feature film, 12 Storeys, a highly acclaimed production which was the first Singaporean film to be shown at Cannes. Interweaving 3 stories about life in the HDB high-rise flats, 12 Storeys was seen as a breakthrough for Singaporean films, combining a coherent plot with Singaporean production crew and actors, such as Jack Neo and Koh Boon Pin. The rest of the decade was encouraging for the growing film industry. Glen Goei's Forever Fever (1998) was picked up by Miramax for S$4.5 million and re-released in the U.S. as That's the Way I Like It. These two years saw the releases of a number of other films, such as A Road Less Travelled (1997), God or Dog (1997), Tiger's Whip (1998) and The Teenage Textbook Movie (1998).