It wasn't that long ago when sex did not figure at all on the cinema screens of Singapore. Censorship of nudity and behaviour considered typical "Western immorality" was enforced rigorously across the island republic under its founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew.

Then things began to change several years ago, as Lee's successor Goh Chok Tong heralded in a more "relaxed" Singapore that was part of a globalised economy, in tune with a globalised if homogenising culture.

Film culture in Singapore has grown accordingly, and Singaporeans are proudly among the highest per-capita cinema consumers in Asia. They enjoy a wide variety of films and are lucrative supporters of Hollywood's products of film and merchandising.

So far, this consumer rush has not precluded made-in-Singapore hits such as "Money No Enough", "Forever Fever" and "12 Stories". Part of the cinema boom can be put down to a revised and more transparent censorship and classification system that allows a wider variety of themes to be shown, including some nudity and sex on "artistic licence" for patrons above 21.

Despite these moves, there was still some surprise - and audience delight - when one of the key themes of this year's Singapore International Film Festival was "Sex in the Asian Cinema".

Even though two films promised for the sex theme were banned, and Nagisa Oshima's controversial 1976 work of love and sado-masochism, "In the Realm of The Senses", was withdrawn by festival organisers after suffering cuts by the censors, the festival organisers were happy with the box-office sales.

Over a dozen films from the region were curated for the theme. The festival itself lasted 16 days and about 300 films from around the world were screened uncut. Among the selection were independent European and American award-winning work from other festivals, and many of the past year's best Asian work.

There were also 14 Asian films in competition for the festival's Silver Screen Awards (see the winning list at [#1] www.filmfest.org.sg[/#] ). In many of these films, observed one visiting Asean film-maker, sex and its depiction on screen played a role. The fact that so many were screened with big houses and without public murmur indicated for this film-maker how far audiences have matured.

For Singaporean film-maker Jasmine Ng, who co-directed the lively "Eating Air" about working-class Singaporean youth and bittersweet romance, the festival has given young Singaporeans a fine platform to show their films uncut to a wider and hopefully regional audience.

In a Singapore context, sex on screen wasn't an issue for Ng but depicting life - warts and all - was. It remained a struggle to acquire film funding, the bureaucracy was unchanged, and moreover most of her peers now make features using digital tape. The launch at the festival of a new website purporting to be a platform for fresh regional film-making, arts.com ([#2] www.8arts.com[/#] ), may be well and good in broad-bandwidth Singapore but how about elsewhere? Though distribution and the space is virtually free, the Net has yet to kill the TV and movie star.

While the theme of sex in the Asian cinema was one of a few featured at this year's festival, the idea of sex was useful currency at the discussions and screening organised. The festival's long-standing programmer Philip Cheah pointed out that "sex in the Asian cinema has a history", that the trail for some young Asian directors has been blazed by auteurs such as Oshima and Tatsumi Kumashiro. It was important, he said, for everybody to get over their urge to censor prurience and instead trust the individual's sense of responsibility; don't censor, just educate and discuss.

According to the organisers, the festival has survived independently for most of its 13 years on a mix of box-office receipts and a range of corporate sponsors. The festival however was hit by the region's financial crisis and has lost a few key sponsors. Stepping into the breach this year has been the state, through grants from the recently established Singapore Film Commission.

The chairman of the commission, Jennie Chua, saw the festival as both a lure for the region's film-makers and cinephiles. It was a platform for the burgeoning number of Singaporean "film students and professionals" through showcases and workshops with regional directors.

But it was the seminars discussing both the history and future of sex in the Asian cinema that drew piquant interest. The panels included film-makers and censorship officials debating with their audience issues such as sex and its political power, with some acutely aware of their place in a region becoming more democratic but not necessarily more liberal in its sexual mores.

After one seminar, the Filipino film-maker Nick Deocampo admitted he "perked up" when he discovered Singapore's festival was featuring the theme of sex, initially finding it a bemusing feature for Singapore. But he noted that there has been no other film festival in the region to have brought up the theme, despite the difficulties the theme of sex has had with censors and the state.

Deocampo could talk from a curious position: he now sits on the Filipino film censorship and classification board - "we don't censor films, even though there are some bad ones out there!" - and has recently been the curator of the republic's Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.

In an entertaining paper, he charted the long history of sex in the Filipino cinema and explained the rise of more explicit images and storylines on screen against the backdrop of his country's politics and recent democratisation.

He suggested that the personal morality of a Filipino leader like former president Corazon Aquino had a more direct impact on censorship rules than her agenda of political freedoms might imply. He said sex was a subversive artistic tool, and its depiction in Filipino cinema has waxed and waned in an often contrary relationship with his country's political changes.

Sex was also about power relations, about those who have it and those who don't. The depiction of nudity and sexual moments in the Asian cinema has mostly been framed by power and violence, not sex - a reflection perhaps of the region's experiences with authoritarianism rather than its new-found democracy.

Much of the sex found in Asian cinema has managed to feature "naked flesh and the chimera of sexual release" with more complex "existential" questions, said Toh Hai Leong of the Singapore Film Society. In Toh's essay for the festival's programme, he discussed the male fear of castration in Oshima's "In The Realm of The Senses" with the violence of rape in some Korean and Hong Kong cinema.

He also traced out the mutation of the early 1970s Japanese sub-genre "roman porno" - or "romance pornography" - into an obsession with sado-masochism, a fascination that also featured in last year's "Lies" by Korean enfant terrible Jang Sun-Woo.

Jang's film depicts the affair of a middle-aged man and a high school student who meet on a blind date that soon becomes a relationship of power, sex and a fair amount of flagellation. "Lies" didn't make it past the Singapore censors for the festival. With a government professing a commitment to a more liberal social and cultural life in its quest for a creative, "digital economy" city-state, there are still some kinds of sex in the city that just won't do.

KEAN WONG is an independent journalist based in Kuala Lumpur.