As Singapore prepares to celebrate its 40th birthday, award-winning director Tan Pin Pin's latest documentary portrays a bitter-sweet image of Singaporeans' complex relationship with their homeland.
Singapore Gaga is a whimsical portrait of the Lion City through the sounds that emanate from everyday situations. From the train announcements ('eating or drinking is not allowed on the stations and trains') to cheers at an Arabic school, news bulletins in Chinese that have become almost forgotten, and a performance by Singaporean avant-garde toy pianist Margaret Leng Tan, the director has stitched together cinema verite vignettes to give viewers an idea of what it means to be Singaporean.
As a shot in the arm for Asian documentary makers - and as an indication that the rest of the world has an interest in documentaries from the region - Singapore Gaga has been selected to screen at the 35th International Film Festival Rotterdam, to he held from January 25 to February 5 next year. It will also be shown in Berlin in autumn.
Tan says the film was inspired by a neighbour who regularly sings to his wife, an Alzheimer's sufferer, to calm her and try to jog her memory. 'One of the songs caught my attention,' she says. 'It was the song they sang when they were communists fighting the Japanese in the Malayan jungles. This song, sung with the right posture and heft, gave me a sense of how we became who we are today. It rendered real the fact of wars fought and won. It also gave me a sense of how powerful sounds and music are in defining oneself or a community.'
Shot with a budget of only S$100,000 (about $465,000) and a crew of three, Singapore Gaga features several Singaporeans on the margins of society, from the wheelchair-bound tissue seller, who sings religious hymns to keep her spirits up, to an old busker who performs in a train station but largely ignored by commuters.
Tan has strived to lightly portray the multi-racial aspect of Singapore and how modernity has pushed older people to the sidelines.
