Saving Singapore's Film Heritage

Thanks to restoration, classic films like The Teenage Textbook Movie (1998) can still be shown on a big screen 20 years after its cinema run. On a mission to preserve Singapore's film heritage, film archivist Chew Tee Pao saves important movies and gives them a second life.

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What Tee Pao Talked About

2:23 – Challenges of restoring The Teenage Textbook Movie (1998)
8:06 – How AFA restored They Call Her… Cleopatra Wong (1978) without the original negatives
13:26 – The sad fate of P. Ramlee’s Seniman Bujang Lapok (1961)
16:20 – The restoration process for Sri Lankan film Bambaru Avith, which was selected for Cannes Film Festival in 2020
20:47 – Tee Pao’s experience at Venice Film Festival
22: 48 – The film that got away in terms of restoration
23:40 – A common misconception about film restoration
24:23 – Film restoration does not equate to preservation
26:41 – The importance of saving film heritage

About the Guest

Chew Tee Pao is an archivist with the Asian Film Archive. Since 2014, he has overseen the restoration of more than 30 films from the archive’s collection. He has written about film restoration in BiblioAsia.

Resources

Chew Tee Pao, "Money No Enough, Passion Needed Too: Restoring Classic Singaporean Films," BiblioAsia 19, no. 2 (2023).

Chew Tee Pao, "Repairing and Restoring Singapore’s Reel Heritage," BiblioAsia 18, no. 4 (2023).

Chew Tee Pao, "Restoring Classic Films from Asia," BiblioAsia 19, no. 4 (2024).

Credits

This episode of BiblioAsia+ was hosted by Jimmy Yap. Sound engineering was done by One Dash. The background music "Di Tanjong Katong" was composed by Osman Ahmad and performed by Chords Haven. Special thanks to Tee Pao for coming on the show.

BiblioAsia+ is a podcast about Singapore history by the National Library of Singapore.