Royston Tan, a young film-maker whose first full-length feature about drugs and delinquency won international plaudits last year, is courting controversy even before his latest film Cut hits the screens.

The 13-minute satire, due to open the Singapore International Film Festival in April, is about a film buff who has a chance encounter in a supermarket with a censorship board official and explodes into a rant on films the board has cut.

The Government, which has poured millions of dollars into developing a film industry and nurturing local talent, is not laughing.

One minister said in Parliament the film could sap Singapore's institutions.

"The producer may think it is funny, but I'm afraid that I don't appreciate such unbecoming attempts to undermine the standing of a public institution," Lee Boon Yang said, Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts.

The film comes at a delicate time for Singapore as it takes tentative steps at relaxing censorship laws that now ban Playboy magazine, routinely clip racy scenes from movies and scissor drug references from pop cultural magazines.

Despite recent steps to loosen some of Singapore's stuffier laws, such as adopting a new film ratings system to give young adults more access to mature content and allowing bars to stay open for 24 hours in some parts of the city of 4 million, state film censorship remains pervasive.

Kate Winslet's disrobing scene in the film Titanic was deemed too daring.

Scenes of women kissing each other in the award-winning film The Hours were also cut, as was a brief glimpse of nudity in recent Oscar honouree Lost in Translation.

The cuts are easily noticeable, giving movie scenes a disjointed feel.

On occasion films are banned outright. Zoolander, starring Ben Stiller as a model dragged into a plot to kill Malaysia's prime minister, was barred in 2002.

A ban on Sex and the City, the hit US television sitcom about a quartet of single women in New York, was lifted last September, but the show has yet to air in Singapore.

Officials say they need more time to ensure citizens are not offended.

Residents say they expect this to mean parts of Sex and the City will still be censored.

Ministers are banking on entrepreneurship, technological innovation and the arts to power the next stage of the country's economic development.

But as the furore over Cut illustrates, building up film-making is not friction-free for the government.

Mr Lee, the Arts Minister, told Parliament that "making fun" of the censorship board would not prompt the Government to change its rules "to suit the agenda of those with vested interests".

Industry sources say some state-funded art institutions have started to distance themselves from Tan, a 27-year-old film-maker who was hailed last year as one of the brightest new lights in Singapore's nascent movie industry.

Tan, whose film 15 about drugs and delinquency won a standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival last year, said he had hoped Cut would spark a constructive dialogue about censorship.

He said it was not meant to be malicious.

"It's not that I wanted to tear down the system or something like that - I believe in the system, but we can improve on it," Tan said.

"I really think it's constructive," he said of his film.

He said he was merely voicing an opinion through the medium he knows best.

Film buffs are concerned that an exhibition of Tan's work at the Singapore History Museum will not be shown in April.

A spokeswoman for the museum said the timing of his planned retrospective clashed with the city state's film festival.

The fate of Cut also hangs in the balance as the film festival organisers wait to learn how the satire will be rated.

"It's a matter of waiting to see what it is," Vinita Ramani said, the festival's publicist.

"The policy has always been that if the film is going to be proposed passed with cuts, we don't show it."

Mr Lee's ministry played down talk of a backlash against the film-maker.

Another of his films, commissioned by the museum, would be shown there until 2006.

"We will continue to tap all creative talents to help us make Singapore an interesting and vibrant place," the spokeswoman said.

Sources and Relevant Links:

Reuters Singapore says satire on censorship not funny 26 March 2004

Sg_Review Singapore - Nanny State Has No Funny Bone. 26 March 2004