10th edition CIFF – 10-14 April 2024

A Land Imagined (2019 Feature Film)

On the fringes of Singapore, anonymous migrants work on an expanding global city. But even though they are building this new world, for its inhabitants they are invisible. What happens when one of them doesn’t turn up to work anymore? In this stylish noir, an insomniac detective is put on the case. Golden Leopard winner in Locarno.

Body

Place: The Cinemas 3

Date: 11 April 2019

Time: 22:15

Duration: 1:05

A Land Imagined (2019 Feature Film)

Yeo Siew Hua | Singapore, France, Netherlands | 2018 | color | DCP | 95′ | Mandarin, English, Bengali | e.s.

On the fringes of Singapore, anonymous migrants work on an expanding global city. But even though they are building this new world, for its inhabitants they are invisible. What happens when one of them doesn’t turn up to work anymore? In this stylish noir, an insomniac detective is put on the case. Golden Leopard winner in Locarno.

Lok, an overtired detective about to retire, investigates the disappearance of a Chinese building worker in Singapore after the man, Wang, suddenly fails to turn up on the construction site. Lok and a colleague start looking into Wang’s life to find out what happened to him. To do so, they find themselves in a part of the city they don’t know: where anonymous building workers live in shabby hostels, around endless rows of cranes in the night. This is the army of invisible, underpaid migrants with no rights who still help the new Singapore to rise.

In his feature debut, with its changing perspectives, both the lonely worker and the Singapore detective see the dark side of this booming metropolis. How do the disillusioned workers survive here? Although the two lives in this neo-realistic drama in a film-noir style are distant from each other, Lok and Wang also have something in common: exhausting insomnia and vivid dreams about a different life.

Place: The Cinemas 4

Date: 11 April 2019

Time: 18:00

Duration: 1:14

Place: The Cinemas 3

Date: 12 April 2019

Time: 16:15

Duration: 1:14

Year in
Festival

2019

Director

Yeo Siew Hua

Camera

Hideho Urata

Cast

Peter Yu
Liu Xiaoyi
Luna Kwok
Jack Tan
Ishtiaque Zico
Kelvin Ho
George Low

Country

Singapore
France
Netherlands

Editor

Daniel Hui

Language

Mandarin
English
Bengali

Length

95′

Music

Teo Wei Yong

Producer

Fran Borgia
Jean-Laurent Csinidis
Denis Vaslin

Production Company

Akanga Film Asia
Films de Force Majeure
Volya Films

Production Design

James Page

Sales

Akanga Film Asia

Scenario

Yeo Siew Hua

Sound Design

Damien Guillaume

Year of Production

2018

Scenarist en regisseur YEO Siew Hua voltooide zijn studie Filosofie aan de Nationale Universiteit van Singapore en is een van de oprichters van het filmcollectief 13 Little Pictures. Zijn experimentele speelfilmdebuut In the House of Straw (2009) werd geprezen door critici als veelbetekenend voor de Singapore New Wave. Met Huan tu (2018) is hij de eerste Singaporees die in Locarno het Gouden Luipaard voor Beste Film in de wacht sleepte.

 

Filmography

(selection) In the House of Straw (2009), Wormhole (2012, short), The Obs: A Singapore Story (2014, doc), Mountain of Knives (2015, short), The Minotaur (2016, short), A Land Imagined (2018)