Shaun Neo

A newspaper editor visits her former teacher, who now cares for his wife with dementia, in this gentle story about the passage of time.

On the last day for the residents to vacate a high-rise apartment before its demolishment, a young girl, Iris, and her mother are moving out. On a tight deadline, her boyfriend and his friend are also present to help. Iris inevitably gets distracted exploring the vacant spaces of her neighbours, relishing the moment. As they pull away in the rental truck for the last time, Iris sits in the back with her boyfriend, surrounded by her furniture. She allows a small ray of light to penetrate the darkness of the truck. The images of the outside world appear on the interior of the truck; they watch the inverted building before it eventually disappears forever.

Lost while visiting the graves of his ancestors, the protagonist finds his future self. Together, they embark on a journey of retracing the places their family would visit during the Qing Ming festival of tomb-sweeping. Inspired by the poetry and in memory of Yeng Pway Ngon (1947–2021).

Four cashier aunties lock themselves up inside the supermarket late at night to protest against their job losses as the chain transits into a cashless system.

On the eve of a new millennium and a looming eclipse, 9-year-old May tries to make sense of her mother’s difficult pregnancy while a neighbour plays a sinister speech on an endless loop.

The intertidal zone where land and sea meet separates the island into two during low tide. The doll, unable to leave the island, recalls a distant memory of the violent separation from her owner and herself. A butoh dancer embodies a castaway doll and performs in a shifting landscape of disappearing bodies of water from intertidal phenomenons. Butoh, also known as the ‘dance of utter darkness’, is a post-war Japanese avant- garde art form. Like the elemental changes of states from water to vapour, she senses something present but unable to be seen. A more invisible performer takes precedence, the PD150, an attribute to forgotten and lost objects. Memory becomes the act of ‘vanishing’ and follows the sensation of ‘missing’ through a span of space and time with objects, locations and people.

One by one, everyone falls asleep forever.

The dance of life is one we dance alone but with many silent and invisible partners. Meena celebrates the lives she lived and the people she loves in a film about the rejuvenating power of time.