Benjamin Alexander Slater

Biography

Ben Slater is a screenwriter, script editor and critic with considerable experience working across various creative fields, including film production, theatre, performance and digital and audio art. His critical writings on film have appeared in many international publications including Screen International and Cahiers du Cinema. He’s authored chapters on film in several books, was the founder and editor of the National Museum of Singapore's film journal Cinematheque Quarterly, edited 25: Histories and Memories of the Singapore International Film Festival (2014), and is the author of Kinda Hot: The Making of Saint Jack in Singapore (2006), the culmination of research into the making of the adaptation of Paul Theroux's novel in 1978. Ben continues to research American and European films made on location in Singapore, and has curated a 10 film season on this theme for NUS Museum in 2015 and presented a selection of these films at the Asia House Film Festival, London in 2016. He is developing a body of critical and creative writing on the subject. He is the credited Script Editor on the award-winning feature film Helen (2008) and Mister John (2013) starring Aidan Gillen, both directed by Joe Lawlor & Christine Molloy, and Script Consultant on Ho Tzu Nyen's HERE (2009), which premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight during the Cannes International Film Festival. He has consulted on dozens of feature and short film projects, some of which have played at major film festivals. Ben wrote the script for the short film The Legend of the Impacts (2012) about Singapore's music scene in the 1960s, which premiered at the Southeast Asian Film Festival, and co-wrote the screenplay for the feature film Camera (2014) with director James Leong, which premiered at the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival. Ben's first sole-authored feature screenplay, The Block, is currently in post-production and due to be complete in 2018. He's the co-director (along with Sherman Ong) of Tony's Long March, a 40 minute documentary portrait of the late Singaporean film producer Tony Yeow. This premiered at the the Singapore International Film Festival in 2015, and was screened at the National Museum of Singapore and the Singapore's National Library in 2017. He's also the director of a 60-second film for The Film That Buys The Cinema (2014), alongside Peter Strickland, Andrew Kotting, and many more, which premiered at the London Film Festival before touring Europe. In 2016, Ben edited the inaugural issue of NANG magazine, and dedicated the entire issue to Screenwriting in Asia, through a series of interviews with some of the leading screenwriters in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, Iran, Indonesia, and more. Aside from film, Ben has been a practitioner in contemporary theatre and performance (including working with Uninvited Guests and spell#7) in the UK and Singapore. He's co-created several site-specific audio works (Kinda Hot in 2003 and Ghostwalking in 2010), and consulted on the redesign of the National Museum of Singapore's History Gallery in 2005-6, and wrote the Childrens' Audio Guide in 2009.

Research Interest

Screenwriting Craft and Practice, Fiction, Narratives & Storytelling, Interactive & Experiential Narratives, Urban Space, Psychogeography, Film Histories & Criticism, Creative Writing.