The Impossibility of Knowing

An emotive anthology by seven of Singapore's most illustrious filmmakers, celebrating SG50 through the lives and stories of Singaporeans. Directed by Eric Khoo, Jack Neo, K. Rajagopal, Royston Tan, Tan Pin Pin, Boo Junfeng, Kelvin Tong.

Tan Pin Pin employs a strictly external perspective for this portrait of her hometown, the tropical economic powerhouse of Singapore, interviewing political exiles in London, Thailand and Malaysia, who are to this day unable to return home.

Chronicling the ways people attempt to leave a mark before they and their histories disappear. Invisible City director Tan Pin Pin interviews people – photographers, journalists and archaeologists – who are propelled by curiosity to find a City for themselves.

Between the opening and sealing of two time capsules in Singapore lives a city in limbo, visited by its own past, present and future.

En is an 18-year-old who has lost his father to cancer. As his family is drawn together in a sudden tragedy, he has to decide what he believes in. But in a country where ideologies are forged on constantly shifting sands, he struggles to stay true to what he knows to be right. And in a family that prefers to forget, the sandcastles of all he holds dear seem doomed to be washed away by the tides of time.

The Chew family is one of 55,000 Singapore families forced to relocate the remains of their relatives to a columbarium as the gravesite is needed for urban redevelopment. The picnic mood of the family outing to move the remains belies the sadness and confusion everyone feels.

China’s booming animation industry has reached us. The film in question is Shuo Feng — Po Zhen Zi, an action epic directed by Zheng Wu and based on an internet novel by A Nu. From what we understand, the film is set in the eighth century, during China’s Tang dynasty. The story draws inspiration from real historical battles, which pitted Chinese forces against the Islamic Abbasid Caliphate and Tibetan Empire in Central Asia. Watch the hyper-kinetic, elaborately composited trailer below:

The connections between three strangers living in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood are explored in this short film.

Singapore GaGa is a 55-minute paean to the quirkiness of the Singaporean aural landscape. It reveals Singapore's past and present with a delight and humour that makes it a necessary film for all Singaporeans. We hear buskers, street vendors, school cheerleaders sing hymns to themselves and to their communities. From these vocabularies (including Arabic, Latin, Hainanese), a sense of what it might mean to be a modern Singaporean emerges. This is Singapore's first documentary to have a cinema release. With English and Chinese subtitles.

In hot tropical Singapore, a traveler stumbles upon polar bears, a road tunnel grand opening and office workers in cubicles. Deadpan in tone, surprising in content, the film captures a mood of a place where time stands still.

Debbie Ding has been documenting survey markings and graffiti in Singapore. One particular set of graffiti catches her attention. Found in the back stairwell in Pearl Centre, Chinatown, the anonymous drawer roughly sketches a man and a woman beside a series of three numbers. Several of these same scribbles are found in different parts of the stairwell. What does it mean? What is the writer trying to communicate? Debbie, like a detective tries to decipher the meaning of these scribbles and she talks also of graffiti in general. Are these acts of vandals or are they notes from people seeking to communicate with others? Or are they acts of memorialisation by the writers themselves? Perhaps it is all three. Recently, Debbie excitedly reports, in the Bugis area near NLB, the same scribble. Has the Yangtze Scribbler moved?

Microwave takes a humorous jab at the world's obsession with everybody's favourite plastic doll. The film was done in a single shot and has screened in multiple festivals around the world.

Crossings: John Woo starts with Woo's emotional homecoming to Hong Kong in 2004 to promote his latest blockbuster Paycheck. It leads you through his teen years where he made avant garde films, his apprenticeship with Shaw Brothers' martial arts director Chang Che, his coming of age as a director directing slapstick Hong Kong comedies through the 70s and 80s. It charts the genesis of the groundbreaking A Better Tomorrow starring Chow Yun Fat, a film that creates a new genre in Hong Kong cinema and launches Woo's career into the international arena.

Documentary about the exhumation of my great-grandparents's grave at Lorong Panchar, off Sixth Avenue in Singapore in 1995 because of a compulsory exhumation order. This video, completed in 1996, provided the basis for a later version of Moving House, 2001. My great-grandfather arrived from Xiamen, China in the late 1800s and opened a crockery shop at Clive Terrace, no longer extant, off Beach Road. My grandfather grew up at Sheik Madrasah Lane off Ophir Road.

Using the visual thesaurus, this animation ponders upon the word “Remember” to see where the word trail leads to if we take things to its natural conclusion. “Remember” leads to “Commemorate”, leads to… there are no wrong turns. Explore and see where we take you.

Ng Meixi returns to Singapore having spent time in Mexico working with low-performing students. She joins a local school as a relief teacher but takes on a mammoth task: to pilot a new pedagogy to help students in the Normal (Technical) stream learn better. She reconfigures the classroom from a teacher-directed one to a community that aims to empower students as learners and tutors to each other. Will this work in Singapore’s result-oriented education system?