“Building Dreams” is an eight-part history of the architecture of Singapore, whose first, second and sixth episode were directed by the architect’s daughter Tan Pin Pin.
A “Rear Window” with a view of a multi ethnic block of flats in Singapore. Camera and sound dive deep into the inhabitants’ lives to listen to their conflicts.
“Afterlife” was a memorable series of documentaries: five stories about living with death that confronted the audience with some truly bizarre problems.
No place shows whether something cruel happened there. A different kind of city tour – with Singapore’s acting axiom Lim Kay Tong, who hosted the TV Pitaval “True Files” from 2002 to 2006, as our off-screen cicerone.
What do you put in a capsule to symbolise and comprise the essence of a place and its culture in a nutshell for eternity? An essay about the fact that history is always on its way to the now.
When does the history of Singapore begin? Is the only relevant part that of the city state created in 1965? At the end there’s a piece of Hegelian logic: “Anything that exists has a reason to exist.” Even the 1956 Coke bottle.
An extremely rarely screened example of a genre cruelly neglected by film history: the puppet porn.
The mortal remains of everyone buried at the Hock-Eng-Seng cemetery are exhumed to be moved to a columbarium. The Tan family do everything in their power to meet the demands of their deceased.
Four years after her first “Moving House”, Tan Pin Pin looks at the same process: the exhumation of mortal remains. While she looked at her own family in the first version, she follows the attempts of strangers, this time.
Urban symphony en miniature and essay on the subject of home.
Singapore condensed: The opening of a street tunnel that looks like a discotheque. At the end trucks are hosed off while a Singaporean flag droops tiredly from its staff.
All protagonists of this film have a similar story of political persecution, systematically suppressed at home by the Singaporean state – which also banned this film.
Debbie Ding documents one of Singapore’s most elusive cultures: graffiti.
