[DVD] Old Romances (老情人 / Lao Qing Ren) (2012)

The launch of the Old Romances DVD coincided with its World Premiere screening yesterday at The National Museum Gallery Theatre, where the directors were on hand to present the film, engage the audience in Q&A, and for an autograph session after the screening.

You can read my review of Old Romances here.

Like its predecessor, Old Romances gets its release on a Region Free DVD (PAL Format), with a key difference - not having television broadcast in mind, this film is presented in its original widescreen format, in an anamorphic transfer, so that's great for many of the widescreen television sets these days. For consistency, this release also sports a similar DVD menu design and function found for Old Places, kept simple with a small preview window that shows clips from either of the 6 chapters that can be selected individually - and clicking it again will bring you to the point in the film proper, or you can use the Play All function to watch the film in its entirety. The chapters do not bring you back to the menu once they're over though, it'll just continue onto the next, until the end of the film.

Even the packaging is kept consistent, done in a very old school style without the usual keepcase, with the DVD disc and 9 thick cardboard postcards when attached together, spells "Old Romances" against a kaleidoscope of nostalgic tile designs.

Film is in a mix of languages, with English subtitles (only) available. Which led to a question during the Q&A session whether subtitles in other languages would be available in future. And it's a reasonable request, for this documentary to be able to reach out to Singapore's older generation who may not be well versed with the English language, or familiar with the languages used by the different narrators.

While the Old Places DVD was relatively bare-bones, Old Romances DVD has a Behind the Scenes (7:08) segment, presented in an anamorphic widescreen format, subtitled in English, and shot in black-and-white, containing interviews with the three directors, and a behind the scenes look at their on-location shoots with the various collaborators and crew. Though short, I think there's probably enough material out there somewhere, where a documentary about the making of Old Places / Old Romances would be extremely interesting, sort of like a documentary about the documenting process. I'm also quite sure there's a lot more material shot that didn't make the final cut of the finished film. A photo-book would also probably not be out of reach, and having them all packaged together - photo-book, documentary, the films proper, would be quite a blast in some ultimate-edition type of release with full bells and whistles.

So Objectifs, what do you think? :-)

Related Links
- Facebook Group
- Q&A Session
- Purchase Old Romances from ObjectifsFilms here.