The screening will be preceded by an introduction from Ryan Lim, whose essay Missing objects, or feeling for companions in unfree terrain discussed, is part of Monographs 2023.

Ryan Lim is a film writer and MA student at the Department of Japanese Studies, National University of Singapore. His research work reads Japanese artistic production from the 1970s, as it relates to fragmenting political logics or emergent collectivities. In his other writing, he is interested in tracing the infrastructural lives of works, by moving closer towards critical moods and our attachments to objects.

Director: Sherman Ong
Runtime: 92 min
Country: Singapore
Language: Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Thai, Indonesian, Malay, Hokkien with English subtitles
Rating: PG

Synopsis

What if suddenly the water supply runs dry in Singapore?

Commissioned by the Singapore Biennale, this fusion of documentary and fiction narrative depicts the lives of foreign migrants as an impending water crisis begins to seep into their lives. With water, or the lack of it, becoming the central motif, this two-part feature length film takes us on a journey across 8 interweaved stories and 10 languages, as the protagonists, consisting of non-professional actors, grapple with this hopefully temporary discomfort, amidst their dalliance with human foibles, and their fantasies of everlasting loves and broken romances.

This aberration is a memento mori as the narratives grazed across the vague impressions of the racial tensions lingering past the 1997 riots in Indonesia, World War II, ritual beliefs, and ethnic discrimination in Southeast Asia which has been ingrained over generations and transported along with the migrant communities. Nonetheless, amidst the sporadic ventures into death and violence, sexual relations and sexualities, these are the lines of division that bind us to each other, in one way or another, as people survive through their crises.

– Texty by Sherman Ong

About the speaker

Ryan Lim is a film writer and MA student at the Department of Japanese Studies, National University of Singapore. His research work reads Japanese artistic production from the 1970s, as it relates to fragmenting political logics or emergent collectivities. In his other writing, he is interested in tracing the infrastructural lives of works, by moving closer towards critical moods and our attachments to objects.

To learn more about Monographs 2023 and the exhibition, please click here.

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