A diet of great cinema

Dine with the trio of women directors who served up â??Breakfast, Lunch, Dinnerâ??

The three women directors of â??Breakfast, Lunch, Dinnerâ? share a bad habit: None of them eats proper meals, because theyâ??re so busy. That was, of course, no bar to the acclaim they received when the movie had its world premiere on Saturday during the closing weekend of the eighth World Film Festival of Bangkok.

In the three separate love stories set in Nanjing, Bangkok and Singapore, the female lead is always named Mei, the late Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto is always mentioned, and the line â??Will you marry me?â? recurs.

Chinese director Wang Jing, who wrote and directed â??Breakfastâ?, was initially stumped when she was asked to do the movieâ??s opening segment.

â??I donâ??t eat breakfast!â? she said, with the pictureâ??s Singaporean producer, Tay Bee Pin, serving as interpreter.

â??People who work in the arts work really long hours and wake up very late, so when I was asked to do â??Breakfastâ?? I was kind of lost â?" breakfast doesnâ??t mean anything to me.

â??I talked to friends, though, and I realised a lot of people donâ??t eat breakfast â?" it has something to do with their environment.â?

Wangâ??s story revolves around two loversâ?? rendezvous in Nanjing.

â??I wanted to do a story about love and space,â? she explained, noting that the highways, trains and bridges featured in her film all denote the space and environment where her two protagonists move around, and how these elements changed them.

Wangâ??s first movie, â??Crosswaysâ?, premiered at the Rotterdam Festival in 2008.

Anocha Suwichakornpong, who directed the â??Lunchâ? segment, presented her debut movie â??Mundane Historyâ? at last yearâ??s World Film Festival. â??Lunchâ? is considerably lighter, a study of two teenage students skipping their afternoon classes.

â??I wanted to make something light-hearted, like a light lunch,â? she said. â??The concept is like lunch as the middle meal. Youâ??re always coming from somewhere, from work or school, and you take a break to have a quick lunch and then you go back to your work.

â??I wanted to capture the passage of time, when everyone seems to be in a hurry except for these two kids, and also the line being friends and being lovers. I wanted to capture this fleeting moment and show that they didnâ??t want this moment to end â?" thatâ??s why they kept on eating snacks, which is another kind of lunch for them. So it ends like a very long lunch.â?

Tay said Anocha was the first of the three directors to finish her work. The others took more than another year, and only then could the movie as a whole be reviewed to ensure smooth transitions.

Singaporean Kaz Cai, who wrote and directed â??Dinnerâ?, said thatâ??s the only meal she ever eats. And, like most peopleâ??s supper outweighing the dayâ??s other meals, her episode is the heaviest of the three segments.

Itâ??s about an old woman waiting for a lost love to return, and a young ex-convict seeking a fresh start with a job at a bakery. Cai shows her Roman Catholic influence by featuring a church, where the lady waits, and images of the Virgin Mary.

â??I just wanted to tell a simple story about somebody waiting for love to return,â? she said. â??Itâ??s a combination of little elements that I wanted to show, like the old men working in the bread shop and the ex-convict trying to get a new life, and how itâ??s really very tough for them.â?

Cai also injected a shock factor with a kiss between the elderly lady and a young British seaman. It elicited quite a mixed reaction from the audience.

â??I wanted to get some kind of reaction â?" a reaction is a reaction, right? â?" rather than just sitting through the film.â?

Caiâ??s 1997 â??Days Gone Byâ? was a finalist in the Singapore Short Film Competition. â??Dinnerâ? marks her comeback to cinema after more than a decade.

As the producer, Tay gave the three directors full artistic freedom to write, as long as they stuck to his framework and the two later segments flowed smoothly from their predecessors.

â??Breakfast, Lunch, Dinnerâ?, made for a meagre US$130,000 (Bt3.9 million), was originally meant to include Malaysia, but that director backed out and Wang was tapped to fill in.

â??I started out wanting to do something in Southeast Asia,â? Tay said. Bringing together the three directors was an â??organicâ? process, he added.

Reflecting on being a female director in a male-dominated industry, Cai conceded that she always has to be more assertive.

â??It always feels like the world is watching, and to be honest, filmmaking is pretty much male-dominated, so being a part of this project made me really happy.â?

Wang is more nonchalant. â??It doesnâ??t really affect me. I donâ??t care if thereâ??s discrimination or prejudice â?" I just look at it individually.â?

Anocha, more optimistic, said â??things are looking upâ? for women directors, although she admitted they still have a long way to go.

â??I just hope it doesnâ??t take too many lunches!â? she quipped.