Cities on screen: seven snapshots of Singapore
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Loading... - Celeste Ling
- 10 Feb 2023
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A landscape in constant flux plays a key role in these portraits of both the light and dark sides of Singaporean society.
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https://www.ft.com/content/00eb99c7-5e99-412a-a491-288dc88f740c
You can still find the old Singapore on screen — the vegetable farms of Potong Pasir, the hawker markets that would be turned into malls, the hubbub of Boat Quay as a working harbour. But the movies that captured those sights are mostly now lost like the landmarks themselves, left to be tracked down in grainy archive on YouTube.
Instead, the (excellent) cinema of Singapore you’ll find on streaming platforms in 2022 was made in the wake of the urban redevelopment that defines the modern city. That transformed landscape is a constant presence in those movies, and often key to their stories too. They bear witness to a place that, now as then, is a patchwork of global influences — with a soul all its own.
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