TIONG BAHRU is the tenth film in the acclaimed CIVIC LIFE series by Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy. Shot on 35mm widescreen on location in the art deco heritage estate of Tiong Bahru in Singapore in June 2010, the film stars a cast of 150 volunteers drawn from Tiong Bahru and from across Singapore. It will soon be available from all branches of the National Library Board in Singapore, while it is appearing internationally at festivals around the world.
This site has been set up to chart the progress of the film. Check out tour details here. We will also be featuring films, writings and artists across the disciplines whose work connects with the Civic Life ideas of belonging, identity, community and place.
Joe Lawlor will be taking part in a discussion at the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney in June, as part of Creative Sydney, a fortnight long series of events exploring creativity, lifestyle, technology and business.
In Europe, shifting populations and the decline of the industrial economy has transformed where and how people live and work. In Asia, rapid urbanization and mass migration are reconfiguring social bonds and putting enormous pressure on cities.
In the face of major social and environmental change, how can art help? Does culture and creativity have a role to play in re-building human connections and making our cities greener, smarter, more welcoming places to live?
In the session, Joe will be exploring the positive potential for art and culture to engage people and transform cities, alongside Dieter Gorny and Katja Aßman from Ruhr 2010 (European Capital of Culture) and artists Markus Ambach (Germany) and Matthias Rick from raumlabor berlin (Germany).
Where?: Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
When?: Saturday 11th June, 3.00 pm – 4.30 pm
Details: Creative Sydney
Togusa Chan’s Miniature Town: Potong Pasir, a striking entry into the WHERE THE HEART IS competition, uses the tilt-shift / time-lapse technique pioneered by Sydney’s Keith Loutit to give a totally new perspective on one of the smallest HDB estates in Singapore, known for its slated roof flats and the school in its neighbourhood.
Togusa is a final year Digital Visual Effects student at Ngee Ann Polytechnic and a freelance photographer who enjoys shooting fashion, portraits, and panoramas. He is currently working on his final year project: a short film shot in Stereographic 3D format.
Of Miniature Town, Togusa writes:
Sandwiched between major expressways and known for housing the St. Andrew’s Village- meet Potong Pasir, the quiet little town I grew up in. Clocking more than 10,000 frames on a Nikon D300s over the course of two days, the film aims to capture students rushing to school in the morning; the lazy afternoon at the playground; the peak of activity as residents rush home in the evening; as well as the vibrant nightlife at the Community Centre’s basketball court. Experience 18 hours in Potong Pasir in just 80 seconds.
Keith Loutit is recognised as the pioneer of the pioneer of the tilt-shift / time-lapse technique that Togusa utilises so effectively, attracting world attention with his BATHTUB series of short films that transformed both iconic and familiar Sydney scenes into miniature wonderlands.
In Loutit’s films, scaled down and sped up realities, real world subjects become their miniature counterparts. Boats bob like toys in a bathtub, cars race like slot-cars, and crowds march as toy armies. Loutit’s aim is create a sense of wonder in our surroundings by “challenging people’s perceptions of scale, and helping the viewer to distance themselves from places they know well”.
SMALL WORLDS is Loutit’s most ambitious project to date, documenting the world’s great cities, landscapes and monuments of the ancient world in miniature. In a time of population explosion, impacts to our environment, and concern over limited resources our world feels smaller than ever. But through Loutit’s lens the world seems simple and uncomplicated, the differences between people are reduced, and obstacles seem easily overcome. By presenting a view of the world from ‘the outside in’ Loutit aims to tell an inspirational story of mankind working together as one. We will see cities being built, the world’s great events, and daily life all in Loutit’s trademark style of miniaturization.
My father grew up in Tiong Bahru, but you won’t see his neighbourhood in this film. Folks as poor as him in the ‘50s and ‘60s rarely ventured into the posh centre of the district, where they’ve preserved all those art deco shophouses and vintage flats.
No, he lived with his widowed mother in one of those zinc-roofed huts in the overcrowded farming village of Kampong Henderson. Their home was next to a pigsty. It smelt so bad, houseguests couldn’t swallow anything for 24 hours till they got used to the stench.
It was a dump, but it wasn’t such a bad place to be a kid. He spent afternoons with the neighbours’ children, playing hide-and-seek and goli and some game called kererek. At night, his gang would visit the farmer who lived on the edge of the kampong, stealing the doraimi fish from his water hyacinth ditch into their rattan baskets.
Once, he tells me, he was climbing a tree in the cemetery to steal a baby bird from its nest. He let go of a branch and landed feet-first on the ground, breaking through the loose soil into someone’s buried coffin.
Stories like that fascinate me. You see, they’re records of a Singapore that no longer exists. Kampong Henderson is gone: it was bulldozed in 1970, all its residents shifted into the Housing Development Board’s high-rise flats. The cemetery, like so many cemeteries here, was exhumed to make way for the living.
My father’s generation has seen Singapore transform from a filthy colonial post-war ghetto island into a sparkling 21st century metropolis. They’ll tell you how proud they are of the progress we’ve made, but they’ll also confess that sometimes, they’re haunted by nostalgia.
They visit their old neighbourhoods. They find their landmarks erased, replaced by shopping malls and condominiums and expressways. They justify their sacrifice to themselves as the logical cost of development.
And as time wears on, they become strangers in their own homeland. They are exiles from a vanished Singapore.
**
A hell of a lot’s been said about Singapore’s crisis of heritage. In the words of our intellectuals and artists, we are a city of forgetting; we are cultural orphans with a history of amnesia. It’s almost become a cliché for us to deplore our rootlessness, our lack of a genuine sense of the past.
One of the most dramatic proofs of this dislocation is the way we’ve demolished our physical landscape. Many a concerned citizen will give you a litany of our lost, iconic buildings, now blasted into rubble: the old National Theatre, the old National Library, the old Drama Centre, the Van Kleef Aquarium, the 7th Storey Hotel, the National Stadium, and of course endless cinemas, schools, shophouse rows and kampungs.
The past, of course, was not a paradise. Most of us were poor, and everything stank. As a young writer, I used to grow impatient with old poets who mourned the loss of a Singapore River that was still polluted and littered with used condoms, or a Change Alley boasting the finest imitation branded goods, name your price and we’ll bargain down.
But then I watched in dismay as my own landmarks began to vanish. A disused fountain at Clementi town centre, a patch of grass above the tunnel in Orchard Road, where Filipina domestic workers used to gather on their days off. My own primary school. A part of you dies when the architecture of your memories no longer exists.
I’ve started to accept that this is one of the key themes of Singapore culture, inasmuch as we’ve been able to build a culture in our fiftyish years of nationhood. We’re a people defined by change, for whom transmutation is tradition: our national bird is the construction crane and our national sport is played with a wrecking ball.
And yet even change changes. In the last twelve years, a state-sanctioned movement has arisen championing our heritage, arguing for its preservation. This is why the Urban Redevelopment Authority has been able to declare certain places Heritage Districts, where the architecture of the ages must not be altered: spots like Chinatown, Little India, Katong and Tiong Bahru. A few old places must remain, after all, if only to look good for tourists.
This is also why we’re experiencing a surfeit of museums, with the National Heritage Board gussying up our oldest buildings and turning them into gorgeous, air-conditioned cultural centres. The Singapore Art Museum occupies the campuses of the old Tao Nan School and St Joseph’s Institution; the Arts House sits in the old Parliament House; the Malay Heritage Centre invaded the old Sultan’s palace at Kampong Glam.
It’s a mind-bending experience, passing through one of these preserved buildings, at once grateful that it wasn’t destroyed and aghast at the sheer hyperreality or perverseness of the scenes. There’s the fully restored Baba House on Neil Road, recreating the living conditions of a wealthy Peranakan family of the 1920s, down to the stray magazines left on the tables. Then there’s the old Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, turned into a centre for boutique restaurants and drinking holes.
I shouldn’t be ungrateful. It’s easier, I’ve realised, to pin memories to a place when its façade still exists, never mind if it’s altered beyond recognition. For instance, I recently visited my own childhood home in Pearl Bank, once the tallest condo in Southeast Asia when it was built in the ‘70s.
Now it’s painted beige and amber rather than stately (if boring) grey, the reception area’s full of ornamental plants, the lifts are no longer clunking boxes of stale cigarette-scented air, and the mama shop downstairs doesn’t sell Kaka chicken-flavoured crisps anymore.
But it’s there, the concrete tower. The shadow child is still standing on the 37th floor, experimenting with gravity by dropping his plastic toys down the stairwell. I count my blessings. In a shifting city, you can’t take anywhere for granted.
**
Joe and Christine have done a ton of historical research into Tiong Bahru. They’ve talked to the residents, and they know all about the demolished school, the condo on the site of the World War II massacre, the apartments where towkays used to hide their mistresses from their wives, the disused bomb shelter and the last Samsui woman, living alone in her one-room flat.
However, they’ve decided to put none of this into their finished film: not one factoid nor ghost story. Instead, they’ve concentrated on telling a story of the present, only dropping hints about how the past shapes us, whether it’s via nostalgia for an old home, or a desire to break away from a family tradition of selling drinks.
It’s been a surprise to many of us involved in the wider TIONG BAHRU project, since so many of us have seized the opportunity to blog about family history and the strangeness of cultural memory or simply to attest to the sorrow of change: how even the renaming of a place generates a sense of loss.
Yet in retrospect, I think Molloy and Lawlor’s decision is a good thing. Blinded by the past, we too often forget to be fascinated with the contemporary. We devalue living history in favour of the dead or dying; we fall in love at last sight without realizing how much we’ll miss the 2010s as soon as they’re gone – especially if the coming decades bring not further development, but decline.
Thus, the following is my philosophy for living in Singapore. Stop, every now and then, and realise that the vista before your eyes is impermanent.
Imagine yourself in the future, remembering this moment in the present. Savour it. Survey the landscape that surrounds you. It may be one of those overcrowded, tastelessly opulent places that everyone loves to hate: Orchard Ion, Iluma, Marina Bay Sands, Resorts World, the renovated Chinatown. In that case, love the overcrowding, love the tastelessness, love the opulence.
Remember: we are not only exiles of the past, but refugees of the present. We try to live normal lives till we’re thrown out again into another unrecognizable country.
So, open your eyes. Try as hard as you can to love your homeland.
A day will come very soon when it will leave you.
NG YI-SHENG
Ng Yi-Sheng is a poet, playwright, journalist, critic, fiction writer and minor activist. He writes about history, sexuality and the development of the arts in Singapore, and has collaborated with numerous local theatre and dance companies through art-making and creative documentation.
He won the Singapore Literature Prize for his poetry collection “last boy”, and is also the author of “Eating Air”and the best-selling “SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century”. He’s currently co-editing “GASPP: a Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose”, which will be released later this year.
OLD PLACES, a documentary directed by Royston Tan, Victric Thng and Eva Tang, and featuring the voices of Singaporeans recalling their memories of disappearing places in Singapore, recorded the highest ratings for any documentary screened last year when screened on Okto last year. It is now available on DVD.
Below, in an interview recorded last year, Ng Yi-Sheng interviews Royston Tan, executive producer and co-director of the film, about the project, his work in general and his personal memories.
There is a launch event at BooksActually in Tiong Bahru, on Tue 10 May at 7.30 pm, where Royston, Eva and Victric will be talking about the project. Details here.
NYS: So tell us about this film.
RT: It’s called OLD PLACES. In Mandarin it’s called 老地方(Lao Di Fang). What happened is we started out with this concept of asking people to write to us or to call us with their stories about places that matter to them, and that probably will disappear very very soon. And from there on we recorded voiceovers and we went to shoot all the locations.
So we captured about 46 to 47 locations. It was supposed to be 50. A few of them couldn’t be captured because there was flooding or they were being destroyed halfway when we went over there.
It’s video documentation of the places overlaid with voiceovers of the telephone conversation of people who contributed their stories. Victric, Eva and I directed this whole thing together, each taking different locations. And over a span of ten days, we finished the whole thing. One day there was an average of like six locations, so 12-hour shoots per day.
NYS: Why did you propose this project?
RT: I wanted to capture all these places because I was born in the late ‘70s and we were the transitional generation. So I saw a lot of things disappearing. So what I cannot control in reality, I want to capture at least on film.
NYS: We’re the transitional generation? I’d always assumed we were the new generation: we were kids in the ‘80s, when Singapore was already a developed country.
RT: My situation was a bit different because I was the last generation to stay in a kampung. So I went from kampung to HDB.
But I really started to understand it when somebody from overseas asked me, “Can you bring me to your childhood place?” I told him, “It doesn’t exist anymore.” But he was insistent, so I took him to my childhood place in Lorong Chuan; it’s a new American school now. So I said, “I cannot even remember where certain places were.” And he saw me struggling to capture these little things. I feel like part of my life is gone.
YS: Can you tell us about the locations you’ve covering in OLD PLACES?
RT: For example, for Seletar Airbase, we have somebody talking about the hijack of a Vietnamese plane. Bobody knows about this! And we also capture the one and only Cantonese opera troupe in Singapore. It’s the Gong Hway Opera Troupe – the ban zu (director) actually took over from the father 20 years ago and nobody knew about their existence, nobody covered them. We also found out about the Wen Zou Clan Association, and how they got al the coolies together to do a five-men lion dance thing after the Bukit Ho Swee Fire in 1952.
All these are being documented. Also some of the more intimate spaces, like where are the last laces you can still catch wild guppies in the drain and things like that.
NYS: Guppies are now endangered?
RT: There’s not much left because of the construction of the sewage system. So now there’s like two places with wild guppies: one is covered, and the other is still a secret place, and if there’s a sequel we’re wondering if we should cover that because that one you can just use your hand and just scoop, it’s all there, there’s so many.
So all these are certain parts of layman history which are not in the museum, which are not anywhere else. And that is what we want to find.
NYS: Have there been any conflicts between the three directors in the project?
RT: Not so much, because obviously I chose to work with Victric and Eva because we have different sensibilities. Victric is visuals, I’m emotions and Eva is logic. So with these three elements together, it feels like we’re a perfect match.
But it’s been very mentally and emotionally draining – it’s almost like shooting a feature film, because of the way we wanted to shoot it: it doesn’t look like a TV show, there’s always big crane movements and even the tracking in is not zoom, it’s all tracking and all that stuff.
There is a responsibility this time to capture this, because it’s going to be gone. Some of the places that are inside here are going to be gone by October. Dover playground, where you can see the slide like a pelican and all that stuff, it’s going to be gone by October.
So all these are places that are going to disappear, and every time we go to the places we feel very sad, like you see old playgrounds where nobody plays. For every one of us, when we go there, there’s bits and pieces of our lives that we can register with the images. So we take the opportunity to film everything at any angle to capture this.
NYS: You’ve actually explored old spaces a lot in your other films, like Hock Hiap Leong, and The Blind Trilogy, where you explored Old Parliament House and Capitol Cinema. How come you’re so interested in nostalgia?
RT: Because I always feel that old places always have a lot of stories. Even a crack in the wall. I know it sounds very cliché, but every time I see something like a rusty lamppost or anything, I think there’s a story there.
It’s like when I did the Victoria theatre piece, No Admittance. That made me… the whole theatre made me feel like it’s a forest filled with secrets and stories. Like the basement below: probably nobody knows that it connects to the Singapore River. It’s a secret passage for those rich merchants in the past, so that nobody could rob their money or all of these things. So all these are little little stories which are very interesting.
NYS: That film was commissioned, right?
RT: No Admittance was commissioned by the Esplanade. But the brief was wonderful. “Do what you want, don’t give me official things.”
Like the National Museum’s commission, Old Man and the River, it was also wonderful. I presented the script to [Museum Director] Lee Chor Lin, and Chor Lin was like, “Royston, I don’t want a textbook. Can you throw all this away? I know you’re working with a government body, but do want you want. I want to see your flavour.” So I threw the whole thing away and I started to tell the story of my uncle, who worked as a coolie. So personal stories lah.
YS: It’s odd – looking at your persona, there’s like two Roystons. There’s the techno rebel, and then there’s this nostalgic guai hai zi [good child].
RT: A sentimental side, yes. That’s why many people say I think you have s plit personality. I think there’s more than two Roystons. There’s five different kinds of Roystons.
NYS: Would you like to introduce them?
RT: There’s the techno rebel one, there’s the nostalgic good one, there’s the very very quiet introspective person, you also have the flamboyant campy one you can see in every film, and the last one is I think a very critical observer. So these are the few things… and it doesn’t go quite well with each other, I think. Because they are so self-conflicting.
NYS: Do you see yourself as a Singaporean director?
RT: I think so, you know. Because I think I’m better at telling Singapore stories, lah. I feel for all the little little things and that kind of feelings you cannot have in any other places.
I try and shoot in other countries, and I don’t have that kind of connection. Like, for example we had a project in China. I realised whatever I was absorbing, I was always the third party. So you are almost seeing things from out of the picture. But when I’m shooting in Singapore, I’m inside the picture. There’s a lot of attachment.
NYS: What are your own special places in Singapore?
RT: One is already gone. In Lorong Chuan, where I used to stay, there used to be this really big tree. So every time I’d go to work I’d pass by CTE. So that tree was a reminder to me that hey, my existence of my childhood. And when the tree got chopped down and they altered the whole road only two years ago, that was a bit shattering to me. That affected me a lot.
NYS: Any others?
RT: Now, that’s still existing? I think Haw Par Villa is one of them.
NYS: Yeah! My dad was saying, “Haw Par Villa is so interesting, why did they knock it down?” And I said, it’s still there! You’re just too lazy to go and see it.
RT: It’s still there. Every time I go back there, it reminds me of the horror of every kid who went there. Because every time we’d go there we’d have nightmare about the 18 levels of hell, we’d start to evaluate our lives. It’s a very interesting kind of education!
And also another one is Katong Swimming Complex. Have you been there? It’s like a time warp. I hope they will not tear this place down. It’s like it’s stuck. Even the toilet is stuck like in an old horror army camp. And there’s like different animal fountains by the swimming pool. You have to go there, it’s amazing. It’s been there for 65 years, like the old River Valley charm, and they say they might just tear it down in five years’ time.
One of the biggest shocks [while filming] was when we went to Seletar Airbase and everything was gone. Everything was gone. My team just went out to do another shoot because we just… all the colonial houses and everything, all gone.
NYS: What are they building there anyway?
RT: An Aerospace Park or something. When I was there, my crew told me, “Whatever you want to shoot, it’s not there anymore.” And I thought, no no, the guys are just lazy, just kidding me. I want to go and see. So I went there. And it’s crazy. It’s all construction. The land is all flattened. And you can see like new highways being built.
I have a lot of fond memories because my ah beng friends, every time they’re under stress, they’ll call me, and we’ll drive to Seletar Airbase. And they’ll tell me, “This is a good place, because we cannot afford to go to Australia. But this place looks like Australia or UK.” Just the lamppost, it’s so colonial. So just driving around, I remember that the good old times, like after 12 midnight, then just go over there, and can see aeroplanes. Wow, we’re in some paradise. So it’s a shock to me, man, to see this.
NYS: You wonder what Singapore will become, after they’ve finished tearing down all these old places.
RT: These two years, Singapore is undergoing a lot of upgrading, a lot of old places being torn down to build condos. And also like new roads: the whole Tai Seng stretch will be gone very soon because they built the MRT line, and the land on top is not every stable. So eventually all the tenants will have to move out.
So there’s a big landscape change. I don’t know what it’s gong to look like next time. So at least I want to be sure I know what Singapore is now.
NYS: You even had to go to Malaysia to film the rural scenes in Little Note.
RT: Yeah, because there’s no more that kind of kampung left already, and I’ve filmed [Kampung] Buangkok like crazy already in 12 Lotus, and I don’t want to go back to the same place. And now Buangkok has also had a facelift. So the strange-looking beautiful bridge is gone, and now it’s all flattened to join to build a new jogging track.
NYS: Kampungopolis.
RT: So it’s all gone. And that’s the place you can still catch mussels. Not polluted water, you know. You can eat them.
NYS: I thought we’d learned to value our heritage by now, and yet…
RT: It’s a conflicting thing I think, because you need to remove some old things to progress. But then again, some of the old things need means a lot to a lot of people. And Singaporeans, I think, these two years, are getting very nostalgic. There was a petition to keep a bus stop, and yesterday there waas another petition, very successful, to keep a particular staircase in Ang Siang Hill because it belonged to a school. They said millions have walked out of that staircase, so they’re going to preserve that staircase.
So it shows one thing: that Singaporeans still love Singapore in their own special personal ways. Maybe not in the big picture, but everyone has their own favourite little haunt, their own little space. And because we have so little space, it matters so much more to them.
NYS: Is there anything else you want to tell readers?
RT: I hope that… I hope that they will appreciate what we’re doing now because so much effort is put into this project. So much. It’s one film where we don’t earn much… (laughs) We’re throwing in more money of our own to do this.
Even the musicians… A lot of local musicians, when they heard about this, they wanted to be part of this film. The Tang Quartet is coming in. It’s not just a collective memory; it’s a collective piece of work with everyone who cares about memories.
NYS: Will it be showing anywhere else after this?
RT: Actually the next stage would be to make it an installation, with 50 projections in a room.
NYS: Do you have a location in mind?
RT: Not yet. We need a big space, man.
NYS: Aiyah, just knock down something and play it there.
Royston: (laughs) Capitol Theatre, that’d be nice. Zirca, maybe. (laughs)
Postscript, May 2011.
Royston on the success of OLD PLACES and the DVD launch.
“I was very surprised by the reaction from the public as there was a huge request for a repeat telecast the next day and after that, many many emails requesting a DVD. I think the public responded strongly because OLD PLACES captures their childhood and everyone seems to want to own a piece of the memories in some of the featured places.
We are currently raising funds to shoot a sequel and if it works well, it will be shot in August. You can support the project by buying the limited edition DVD, available only at Kinokuniya, Books actually and Objectifs. Grab a copy and support us!”
Royston Tan is a Singaporean filmmaker. A graduate from Temasek Polytechnic, he first came to prominence through his short films: Sons (2000), Hock Hiap Leong (2001), 48 on AIDS (2002), Mother (2002) and 15 (2002). He has so far directed four features.
NG YI-SHENG
Ng Yi-Sheng is a poet, playwright, journalist, critic, fiction writer and minor activist. He writes about history, sexuality and the development of the arts in Singapore, and has collaborated with numerous local theatre and dance companies through art-making and creative documentation.
He won the Singapore Literature Prize for his poetry collection “last boy”, and is also the author of “Eating Air”and the best-selling “SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century”. He’s currently co-editing “GASPP: a Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose”, which will be released later this year.
Mark Tipple from Sydney has emerged as a notable documentary photographer over the past 3 years. Having worked closely with organizations seeking social change in Australia and surrounding countries, his progression has seen the development of Gallery For Justice, a not-for-profit aiming to empower story telling through fine art prints documenting issues of social justice.
As the principal photographer of The Underwater Project; an ongoing reportage showcasing Australia’s relationship with the ocean, Mark aims to connect the three areas of his work to bring light to stories traditional media shies away from.
10 years ago after high school I spent a few years traveling around Australia in an old station wagon filming surfing, clutching to dreams of making it in the surf film industry that would facilitate my future of cruising around the world to exotic beaches filming perfect waves. While the surfing and conditions were what I wanted to be filming, the images always left me wanting more. After trying countless experiments of camera positions (helmet camera, board camera) and different places to film while in the water (pole extensions, different lenses), I still couldn’t capture what I was seeing in my mind.
Fast forward to 2009 and after directing a film in Mexico on shark divers I had an underwater camera which we used to get closer to the sharks than our larger cameras physically could, upon returning to Sydney I started shooting surfing again, however this time from below. A month later I was shooting a small shorebreak and was caught inside by a large set, as I dove under I noticed a group of kids next to me. I turned the camera onto them and shot them as they contorted and struggled to avoid the wave above; surfacing I glanced at the lcd screen and the first Underwater Project image was there. Entitled ‘Escape’, to this day it’s as close to the images that I was chasing a decade ago. “
Tang Kang Sheng’s Remember was one of the most personal films entered in the WHERE THE HEART IS competition, and received a Special Mention from the Jury.
The film is an attempt to hold on to a memory of a disappearing estate that the filmmaker lived in since he was a child. As everything in life changes, the film tries reconciling the person we become versus who we were. Nothing in the past changes but how we choose to reflect will affect our future. It is dedicated to his family who never fails to remind him of that fact.
Joe Lawlor on Remember: “Employing a family album of evocative photographs, REMEMBER skilfully attempts to reach back into a personal history. The effort to reach back is both courageous and illusive. Illusive, because for all their resonance the photographs aren’t enough. Something more is needed. Words. And not just any words, but words which conjure up a specific place.
Remember is a thoughtful reflection on the tension that exists in all of us. The tension between who we are now and where we have come from so that we may better forge a future for ourselves. What made this film so strong for us is that the narrator recognises how both the past but also specific places mark us and how place is central in that act of remembering.”
Says Kang Sheng: “The film was made as my grandmother’s estate was being en bloc and all the residents were slowly disappearing before the end of the year. I always wanted to capture what I felt was special about the estate growing up there. So, borrowing a Canon 550D from a friend of mine, I went down to find most of the flats already emptied and some structures already disappeared.
The first version of the narration was a cliche description about the disappearing estate, I did multiple takes of it and was not happy. So I took awhile to ask myself why I was really remembering all these things, and I realize it was more than just nostalgia. It was about becoming a version of myself that was just as happy as I used to be, and that now with all the cynicism that sets in with growing older I might have lost it along the way.
Seeing the film now is quite surreal, though i still remember the process and the rush for deadline,all I that is just in the background to what I feel is truly a film more than just for the competition but a reminder to myself. I am still surprised that people have a such response to it and am still very appreciative of kind words towards it.
Since the competition I have been writing short scripts and been trying to get them made, hopefully soon.”
Tang Kang Sheng has been trying to get short films off the ground with friends of his since 2008. A special interest in human connections and memories is what he tries to explore in his films. He is currently studying at the Nanyang Technological University pursuing a degree in Digital Filmmaking.
CIVIC LIFE, a unique series of films exploring communities and public space, made by Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor (UK), will screen at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) on Friday 3 June followed by a live Q&A with Lawlor. On this Melbourne visit, local artists and filmmakers will also have the opportunity to attend a workshop with the acclaimed UK director.
ACMI will screen a compendium of the short films created across the UK, Ireland and most recently, Singapore. The screening will include the award winning films, WHO KILLED BROWN OWL and JOY, as well as a preview of TIONG BAHRU, shot in Singapore last year with cast of 150 volunteers from the Tiong Bahru estate and across Singapore. Each film has its own distinct qualities, but their real emotional power is perhaps only fully realised when seen as a whole. For this screening, the films have been edited together without titles or credits and the resulting uncertainty as to when one films ends and another begins, drawing out and intensifying the overlapping themes of identity and place, belonging, hope, loss and new beginnings.
The screening will be accompanied by a question and answer session with Lawlor.
The screening will also be accompanied, on Saturday 4th June, by a masterclass with Joe Lawlor. In this class, Joe will be sharing with you his experience and process of working with communities and discuss with you the challenges and important issues to consider when working in this area; he will be talking about how to find funds from non-screen agencies; working with non-professional performers; the move from making to shorts to features; the festival circuit and working on international co-productions. He will also be workshopping with you approaches and ideas for micro-short films inspired by ideas of place, community and identity, and you will have the opportunity to have your film featured on this website.
As one half of the filmmaking partnership desperate optimists, over the last 7 years Joe Lawlor has co-directed a series of beautiful, critically acclaimed films, shot on 35mm widescreen, which explore the relationship between community, belonging and a sense of place. Called CIVIC LIFE, the narratives of the films are developed through a process of consultation with communities about the places that matter to them, and volunteers drawn from the communities go on to star in the films. Joe’s much-praised debut feature film HELEN (co-directed with Christine Molloy) played at films festival around the world, while the latest CIVIC LIFE film, TIONG BAHRU, has just been shot in Singapore.
In this masterclass, Joe will be sharing with you his experience and process of working with communities and discuss with you the challenges and important issues to consider when working in this area; he will be talking about how to find funds from non-screen agencies; working with non-professional performers; the move from making to shorts to features; the festival circuit and working on international co-productions. He will also be workshopping with you approaches and ideas for micro-short films inspired by ideas of place, community and identity, and you will have the opportunity to have your film featured on this website.
This masterclass is a collaboration between METRO SCREEN and Balcony Productions, with support from British Council.
Date & Time: Tuesday, 7th June 2011, 6.30 pm – 9.00 pm
Venue: METRO SCREEN, Paddington Town Hall, Cnr Oatley Rd and Oxford St
Maximum number of participants: 15
Samantha Tio is an artist and portrait photographer born in bred in Singapore. Along with fellow photographer Alecia Neo, Samantha was the production photographer for the TIONG BAHRU shoot.
Samantha enjoys creating environmental portraits that weave together personal narratives together with anthropological concerns, while her portraiture work is highly thought of.
Her latest body of work, Table for One is a year long archive of solo diners whom she meets by chance. The work looks intimately into Singapore’s eating-out culture and uncovers moments of convergence where individuals negotiate their own private world in these public spaces.
Writes Sam, “(Table for One) looks intimately into Singapore’s eating-out culture, using restaurant interiors as backdrops for monologues of alienation, individuality, loneliness and independence. Just as much as space in the city informs social situations and urban planning charts out the dynamics of a city’s culture, Table for One uncovers moments of convergence where individuals negotiate their own private world in these public spaces and moments of chance that brings two people together. In this process, I’m uncovering the relationships between loneliness, food, fate and the city.”
In a previous project, CONVEYANCE, commissioned by the Singapore Art Museum, Samantha explored the nightscapes of Asia, using slow shutter speeds to create kaleidoscopic abstract patterns of the streets of Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok.
Samantha is currently creating new works in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She lives by the rice fields with a pet Pitbull name Nona. By night, she enjoys watching fire flies. Read more about her work and stay in Yogyakarta here.
Says Sam about the TIONG BAHRU shoot: “Working behind the lens for ‘TIONG BAHRU’ together with Joe and Christine and the people from the cast and crew gave me the experience of working in a different community – one that came together in a common vision for the film. Though the shooting was for just a brief period, this group of creative people continue to motivate and inspire me in my work.”
See some of her work on the project below and see the full collection, including the work of Samantha’s collaborator Alecia Neo, here.
More on Photography: Buenos Aires-based Irina Werning revisits family photographs, to show us how time works its changes in her Back To The Future project. It’s a fun collection, but tinged with melancholy. See some of her work here.
Alvin Pang is a poet and editor from Singapore . Here he writes of a geography of Singapore mapped through personal reminiscences.
This essay features in the booklet accompanying the DVD of TIONG BAHRU, available from all NLB branches from the beginning of May.
In my father’s head is a map of Singapore quite different from the ever-dancing web of abstract colours that we have come to know from the official records, the bus and train stations or the increasingly unreliable street directory. His chart of the city is marked by stories and street legends, not signposts or landmarks. Like the key characters in tales, who do not often stay in one place, the settings shuffle about – without causing anxiety, as long as one has been following the plot.
Food is frequently the main protagonist in these narratives; the human characters are props to keep things moving along and interesting. The Hill Street Char Kway Teow is the one in Bedok as long as the same uncle – but not his wife – is cooking that day, but the Katong Laksa in Katong isn’t actually the real deal, because the one who inherited the secret recipe – the surviving partner, or second child, or favourite disciple – has branched out under a different brand. Ditto Fat Girl’s Fishball Mee (the noodles are still right but the soup is wrong; Fat Girl took it with her), the Crabmeat Fried Rice (one of the twin sisters died and the other sold out to a franchise), the Famous Nasi Padang (a rival bought out the original stall and all its assistants, the popular chef moving two doors down to a grubbier unit, unbeknownst to most customers).
His chart of the city is marked by stories and street legends, not signposts or landmarks.
So one locates Jalan Kayu by where the original roti prata stalls are, and Satay Club is wherever the real satay is still being made. It is the sort of dynamic, grapevine-positioned sense of locality that has evolved from the days when roving street hawkers had to elude the authorities but still keep the regulars coming back. The prime rib bak-kut-teh, the crayfish horfun, the dimsum that defined a district are gone, but gone where exactly?
Chances are, Dad knows where. Drive around downtown with him, and he will identify the location where hokkien prawn mee was first fried up by a hainanese ship’s cook in the Rochor area. The dish became popularly known as Rochor Mee, and eventually he had to abdicate his legacy to his hokkien assistants and clientele who dominated the area, but one of his descendants still serves up the much-acclaimed original recipe, reinserting “Hainanese” into the stall name for good measure (look in a Beach Road basement for the queue, the thin, greying uncle and the rave reviews by Japanese foodie magazines). He will show you Damenlou hotel, where fishhead beehoon was conceived in the 1920s. Joo Chiat, where they still make fresh popiah skins by hand, beside the dusty old tea merchants and wok peddlars. He will take you to Geylang to see the legalised red light district: an education, but also one of the best places, like in many cities, for late night suppers. Order teochew muair near Cambridge market; Dad will reel off the names of the dishes, the many varieties of steamed fish and ask for a separate bowl of geng – plain starchy rice water – in his native tongue. The towkay neo, scowling but satisfied, will give him extra portions.
He will point out where the street vendors and shophouses used to be around Bugis Street, Bras Basah Road, St Andrew’s Cathedral, Victoria Street, along the broad avenues and alleyways he used to walk on his way to school at the old Raffles Institution. Tussling with clubbers for parking on Liang Seah Street where he used to live, he will tell you how he caught rats to earn spare pocket money for wonton mee; how he would lower a basket jingling with coins from a dark third storey apartment window and lift it full of piping hot dinner and spare change. He will nod knowingly at the former gangster boss who now serves the best kopi in Kallang, whose brother used to go swimming with him in the deep waters off the harbour. As boys they would dive next to passing ships, and once one of them failed to surface from the giant wake; his friends went down and down again to look for him in vain, finally had to tell his mother. There’s the corner (now a Starbucks) where my grandfather used to squat to take his dinner of plain rice and salted vegetables along with the river coolies in between lorry shifts. Changi beach, where Ah Kong was taken to be shot by the Japanese; he fell in before the rifles went off, clawed his way out from under the bodies at night, ran all the way back to town, and survived. Near where the seafood restaurants are now, Dad says, that’s how you remember the spot.
Of course this gourmand’s tour, this storytelling, is Dad’s way of encoding his memories of the city, and what it has meant in his life, to family, to us. Tiong Bahru market, where Joe and Christine have located their remarkable film, was one of these nexuses of memory; it was always a favourite of Dad’s, for freshly steamed pau and raw fish congee. Much like one of Dad’s vivid narratives, the camera sweeps lovingly over the hawker stalls and occupied tables at a poignant pace, taking in the colours, contours and conversations of a place that surely one day shall also pass, but in that cinematic moment remembered as an oasis of nourishment, pleasure and human warmth.
When it comes to Love, Joe and Christine remind us, there is always too much to keep track of, and only a brief time in which to show it;
It is not for nothing that that well-worn metaphor for a multicultural, cosmopolitan city – the melting pot – borrows its import from communal feasting, and the profound sense of belonging and conviviality it suggests. It seems to me that Joe and Christine have crafted for us a love story – in the sense that my father’s food tales too are love stories about the city of our belonging. Like all good dishes and affairs to remember, the filmic Tiong Bahru is sumptuous in detail and richly layered in resonances, with a lingering, evocative finish. The film is brimming with flavours and textures: a dizzying array of dishes, voices, tongues and tones. It all matters. When it comes to Love, Joe and Christine remind us, there is always too much to keep track of, and only a brief time in which to show it; yet we renew its geographies every time we revisit its paths and gardens, sit down for a good meal together, and leave crumbs with which to find our way back home.
This essay features in the booklet accompanying the DVD of TIONG BAHRU, available from all NLB branches from the beginning of May.
Alvin Pang is a poet and editor who has featured in publications and festivals around the world, in over a dozen languages. A Fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, he was Young Artist of the Year for Literature in 2005, and was conferred the Singapore Youth Award (Arts and Culture) in 2007.
HOW DOES ART HELP? Building creative cities around the world http://t.co/cVcNBTf Joe on TIONG BAHRU and CIVIC LIFE @ Creative Sydney 11 Jun 9 hours ago
