VIFF: A Land Imagined
The film is called "A Land Imagined" though another translation could be easily been "Dream Land". It is a film that is a direct contrast to "Crazy Rich Asians", and exposes the exploitation of migrant workers used in the Singapore reclamation projects.
It bills itself as a neo-noir film, in that it starts with a crime in a tense and gritty world, and the story is sparse and driven nearly completely by a few characters.
It starts with a pair of detectives investigating the disappearance of migrant worker Wang. The movie quickly cuts back to the story of Wang and how as a migrant worker from China, he is forced to live in squalid and cramped conditions, and is all but held hostage by the company which he owes money to. He spends his sleepless nights with his friend Ajit, a fellow migrant worker from Bangladesh, and at a 24-hour computer cafe where he creeps and befriends the manager Yue, herself a recent transplant from China. One night Ajit goes missing, and Wang fearing the worse desperately investigates his disappearance. Back in the present detective Lok is himself sleepless and starts to mimic and relive Wangs life to try to discover the reasons for his own disappearance. The story takes on a dream like state where both Wang and Luk's sleep deprivation increasingly distorts their reality and reasoning.
The director presents a story of struggle and confinement in one of Asian's great economic marvels and shows the lengths to which Singapore is willing to become and stay one. Literally turning mountains to sand. On first impression the movie meanders a bit and the directors love of interstitial long shots breaks the film up awkwardly. I also thought the story was too open-ended and fraught with convoluted plot devices. Although the more I thought on the characters and the environment, the more connections and symmetry each provides the other I saw. Through the film we see Singapore through the eyes of its sleepless characters and perhaps the city itself as one, walking through a dream haze of what they are, what they can be and what the need to be.