February 21, 2019

The mystery drama film, A Land Imagined, directed by Yeo Siew Hua, was recently reviewed in The Straits Times, where it was rated 3.5 stars. Set in Singapore, the film explores big ideas like ethics and identity through a detective story involving an insomniac investigator and a missing Chinese migrant worker. The intellectual tensions fleshed out in the film should come as no surprise as Yeo Siew Hua is a philosophy graduate from NUS.

Film critic John Lui calls A Land Imagined a “bold work that seeks to unsettle…the ground beneath our feet”. The plot zeros in on Lok, a detective with cosmic instincts who tries to solve the mysterious disappearance of Wang, a Chinese construction worker at a land reclamation site. The investigation plays out against the backdrop of a twilight world inhabited only by migrant workers, as their characters grapple with feelings of alienation and belonging. Their supervisors, who take sand from other countries to reclaim Singapore’s coastline, double as villains withholding the truth surrounding Lok’s investigation.

The complexity and creativity of the film, masterminded by director Yeo, may have been decisive in winning it the Golden Leopard prize at the Locarno Film Festival and the Best Asian Feature Film prize at the Singapore International Film Festival last year.

Read the review here.