Curated under the theme “There’s Gotta Be More”, Singapore Panorama Shorts Programme 1 brings together seven short films questioning the expectations and routines shaping everyday life in Singapore. While some confront these pressures directly, others approach them through humour, horror and formal experimentation.
Opening on a high-energy note, Nah Yee Chern’s Everything’s Peachy follows a kitchen hand whose dream job takes a grisly turn. Juxtaposing the adorable character designs with a macabre tale, the animated film showcases an impressive range of techniques, from stop-motion to live-action animation. Its mixed-media approach recalls the television series Courage the Cowardly Dog, where the contrast of visual styles creates an underlying sense of unease. The film offers an exciting glimpse into Singapore’s burgeoning animation scene.
Food takes on a different significance in Cheryl Wong’s It’s Not Sweet, which slows the programme’s pace within grounded realism. Where Everything’s Peachy explores the horrors lurking beneath blind idolisation and career aspirations, It’s Not Sweet turns towards the struggles of two siblings who find solace in familiar routines, such as eating a watermelon before a birthday buffet, amid a fractured family life. The compelling performances of its young actors lend emotional weight to an otherwise unassuming premise.
Questions of aspiration extend beyond the workplace and household in Enze Kay’s Adrift/A Rift, which considers how romantic relationships become entangled with Singapore’s economic expectations. Recalling Marguerite Duras’ India Song (1975), static shots of empty spaces, cargo ships and mangrove trees accompany an omnipresent narrator reflecting on a relationship’s dissolution. For couples navigating a system like Singapore’s, even a breakup might resemble a poor investment. Although its commentary occasionally risks becoming didactic, the film offers an intriguing examination of intimacy through the language of economic productivity.
Where Adrift / A Rift relies on disembodied narration, Maximilian Liang’s black-and-white Daphne as Woman (Crying) places its performers at the centre of an increasingly uncomfortable audition. There is an intriguing self-reflexivity to an actress playing an actress, particularly as she stares directly into the camera, implicating the viewer in the audition process. The casting assistant is similarly framed, creating an unsettling sense of confrontation. Despite these inventive cinematographic choices, the performances of its two leads lack the chemistry necessary to sustain the film’s mounting tension.
Chong Lii’s Low-Hanging Fruit similarly favours formal experimentation, although its sparse narrative exposition makes the film challenging to follow. Instead, the viewer is encouraged to engage with its atmosphere and associative imagery. A particularly striking montage cuts from fingers brushing aside styrofoam beads to a school of fish, suggesting a relationship between aquatic life and bodily transformation. While its narrative elements occasionally feel disjointed, the film is most compelling when it embraces this more experimental, affective approach.
The programme subsequently finds a lighter register in Seth Cheong’s Singaporeans at Gyeongbokgung Palace, which imagines the conversation of visitors at the Korean landmark as though they were Singaporeans. Juxtaposing distinctly local conversations with traditional Korean architecture, the film playfully indulges in Singaporean kaypoh-ism. Particularly delightful is when the voice of a crying child is mistaken for the call of a koel.
The playful absurdity carries into Megan Lim En’s Coast to Coast, where a bureaucrat’s seemingly straightforward task of fixing a printer spirals into a surreal odyssey. Deeply Beckettian, the film finds humour in the incongruous sight of a suited civil servant carrying a printer across an open field and encountering a mysterious Strawberry Man driving a miniature car. Animated sequences by Ryan Benjamin Lee incorporate printer marks and colour charts to extend the film’s preoccupation with the machinery of office work.
While the programme’s varying approaches to its theme produce an occasionally uneven viewing experience, its strongest films find inventive ways to question the expectations governing everyday life in Singapore. Perhaps what unites them is less the promise of a better life and more the suspicion that what we have been told to aspire towards might never be enough.
Written by Phyllis Chan, edited by Daryl Cheong