The Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF) will wrap its 37th edition on Nov. 1 with “Vintage Violence,” Eugene Kotlyarenko’s livestream-era crime caper starring Cole Sprouse and Mizuhara Kiko.
The screening brings back a stand-alone festival closing, which SGIFF last staged in 2014.
The film bowed in the Midnight Madness section at the Toronto Film Festival and will have its Asian premiere at Singapore’s Capitol Theatre. Kotlyarenko, Sprouse and Mizuhara will attend.
“After more than a decade, we are excited to bring back the festival closing as a moment for audiences to come together for one final film on the big screen,” said SGIFF executive director Jeremy Chua. “‘Vintage Violence’ felt like the right film to close this edition – unruly, contemporary and deeply attuned to the ways technology has changed how we see, share and experience the world around us.”
In the film, a livestreamer named Carter is exploring an abandoned Colorado mine when he turns up a pair of 19th-century Levi’s. Izumi, a viewer of his channel based in Japan, tells him the jeans would fetch a fortune in Tokyo’s denim market. The plan unravels once Izumi’s indebted boyfriend draws in Edoga, a denim-obsessed underworld figure, and an exiled yakuza, whose cybernetic middle finger sprays a drug mist, arrives looking to settle scores with Edoga. The film leans on split screens to show text threads, streams and their live chats.
Born in Odessa, Kotlyarenko moved to New York and enrolled at Columbia University, taking film, philosophy and literature. He previously directed “Wobble Palace” (2018) and “Spree” (2020), which also centers on online culture.
The director and both leads will also appear at an “In Conversation With” session at the National Museum of Singapore on Oct. 31, covering Kotlyarenko’s interest in screen culture, how the film was made and how Sprouse and Mizuhara have approached screen acting over their careers.
Other sessions in the strand feature Aamir Khan, Peter Chan and Shim Eun-kyung on Oct. 22, Koreeda Hirokazu on Oct. 24 and Anthony Wong on Oct. 29.
SGIFF opens Oct. 21 with Hur Jin-ho’s “The Assassin(s),” which the festival has kept as its opening film after South Korea’s conservative People Power Party, writing on behalf of all 109 of its lawmakers, asked it to drop the title over claims that it distorts history.
The festival is supported by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA).
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