Our hearts have been palpitating all morning: hot on the heels of the Laneway line up announcement, there's this.

Just when we were starting to suspect that, like his last film sex.violence.family values, Ken Kwek's hot Toronto International Film Festival-screening gangster film Unlucky Plaza would be banned in Singapore, the Singapore International Film Festival has just announced that it will be...drumroll...the opening film of the festival on Dec 4!

We recently spoke to Festival Director Zhang Wenjie, who said the festival would rather not screen a film than screen a cut version, so we're guessing you're going to get Ken Kwek's full feature enchilada. 

Here's a trailer to whet your appetite:

Other movies that are confirmed so far include Chinese thriller Red Amnesia by Wang Xiaoshuai and Palme d'Or-winning Turkish film Winter Sleep. The SGIFF also announced that their Filmmaker in Focus this year is young Egyptian musician turned filmmaker Ahmad Abdalla.

In a brand new segment called Special Presentation, the SGIFF will screen Bring Back the Dead by Singaporean filmmaker Lee Thean-Jeen.

For more information, visit the SGIFF site. To read more about the film scene in Singapore, check out our recent investigation. Incidentally, Singapore also recently announced its official submission to the Best Foreign Film category at next year's Oscars. For the first time, it was a Malay-language film (by veteran television director Sanif Olek).