No homosexual movie to be shown at Singapore film festival

From Pravda

Sex scenes showing the homosexual relationships between teacher and his 18-years-old student became the reason to remove movie from a local Singaporean film festival after government censors said sex scenes from the film had to be cut.

Organizers of the Singapore International Film Festival and producers of "Solos" said Monday the film would be withdrawn from public screening in line with the festival's policy of only showing uncensored films.

The festival opened April 18 and runs through April 30. "Solos" was originally scheduled to be screened on Wednesday.

The film received an R21 rating - which restricts it to audiences over age 21 - with three cuts from the Singapore Board of Film Censors, said Florence Ang, the film's producer.

The board said in a statement that the film contained "prolonged and explicit homosexual lovemaking scenes including scenes of oral sex and threesome sex" which had to be removed.

The cuts make up about five minutes of the 77-minute film, Ang said.

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Host Not Found

Dissidents must be protected from internet censorship, argues Hari Kunzru in an essay for a PEN anthology, Another Sky.

Saturday March 31, 2007
The Guardian

"Sometimes the 'Don't be evil' policy leads to many discussions about what exactly is evil. One thing we know is that people can make better decisions with better information. Google is a useful tool in people's lives. There are extreme cases, we're told, when Google has saved people's lives." Sergey Brin, Google founder, interviewed in Playboy, September 2004

As the internet enters its second decade as a mass medium, it's worth looking back at one of the old saws that was bandied around in the covered-wagon days, when Californian sages made gnomic pronouncements about the future and the rest of the world repeated them at dinner parties. "The net treats censorship as damage and routes around it." These are the words of John Gilmore, radical libertarian, Sun Microsystems employee number five and bona fide west-coast guru-gazillionaire, and for much of the last 10 years they've been repeated as part of the founding story of the internet, along with a gloss about the net's inception as a military communications network designed to withstand partial destruction by nuclear attack.

In a technical sense, Gilmore (who was talking to a Time magazine journalist in 1993) has been proved right. The internet has provided an efficient conduit for people to share all manner of information other people don't want them to, whether those people are government whistle-blowers, child pornographers, political dissidents, intellectual property pirates or terrorists. From the Drudge Report to beheading videos, censorship is being successfully circumvented around the globe. Looked on from the neutral standpoint adopted by network engineers, this is proof of a robust system. Ethical or political judgements about the content of the information flowing through the networks aren't relevant. It's all data. We should celebrate.

However, around the world, people have also discovered that, despite the abstractions of network architecture and the nostrums of boosters who predicted a "new economy" free of material constraints, the internet is also a physical thing, which has its existence on real telephone lines, internet service provider (ISP) routers, undersea fibre-optic lines and hard drives humming under tangible desks. And it's used by people sitting in real offices with real doors that can be broken down by all-too-real police if the information they're sharing contravenes local laws - and in some cases even if they don't, but some foreign power strong-arms their government, as happened in Sweden in May 2006, when US diplomats incited a police raid on an ISP hosting a popular file-sharing service called the Pirate Bay. The internet's ability to route round censorship has the character of an ideal rather than a reality, a theoretical property.

No one understands this better than the Chinese journalist Shi Tao, who in April 2005 received a 10-year prison sentence for "divulging state secrets abroad". A translation of court proceedings showed that Yahoo! Holdings (Hong Kong), a subsidiary of the American search corporation, had given information to Chinese state investigators allowing them to link him to re-postings on foreign-based websites of an internal message the authorities sent to his newspaper regarding coverage of the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

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SMEGMA

Dear Friends & Supporters of Truth

SMEGMA, written and directed by Elangovan and presented by Agni Kootthu (Theatre of Fire)was the most controversial play of 2006.

On 1 Aug 06, MDA gave the play a public entertainment license with RA-18 rating, and suddenly cancelled the license on 4 Aug 06, the eve of the production.

MDA replied that SMEGMA portrayed Muslims in a negative light.

But MDA had the full particulars of the 5 Muslims who were acting in the play.

Subsequently, MDA's bureaucratic acrobatics raised questions on 'transparency in censorship' (if there is one in Singapore) in the international print-media and alternative websites.

Since then, many have asked for the text of SMEGMA.

SMEGMA, the book, ISBN: 981-05-6441-4, S$15 (without GST). is now available at
Select Books Pte Ltd
19 Tanglin Rd #03-15
Tanglin Shopping Centre
Singapore 247909
Republic of Singapore
Tel: 65-67321515
Website: www.selectbooks.com.sg

The communication between Agni Kootthu (Theatre of Fire) and MDA, as well as the press-release to the international media are documented in SMEGMA, a social register of the hilarious state of censorship in Singapore.

Kindly globalise this information for those who would like to enjoy reading SMEGMA to inhale some alternative truth from the plastic nation.

Thank you.

_________________________
S Thenmoli
President
Agni Kootthu (Theatre of Fire)

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Singapore

SINGAPORE: Portrait book's nudity 'excessive'

Book featuring near-nude celebrity photpgraphs banned while Communication and the Arts Minister Lee Boon Yang says he will continue to revise censorship rules

Straits Times
Saturday, February 17, 2007

A photography book that featured near-nude images of celebrities was banned here because it exceeded the current content standards for publications.

Information, Communications and the Arts Minister Lee Boon Yang said the Public Consultative Panel, made up of members of the public, agreed that the book Superstars -- by Singapore photographer Leslie Kee -- should not be allowed to be sold here.

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Date Posted: 2/17/2007

Singapore