The tag-line for AlieNation, a series of movie screenings that forms part of the Fringe Club's City Festival, invites viewers to 'discover Singapore through its films'. In place of the picture-postcards of a happily multicultural and entrepreneurial metropolis, AlieNation offers gritty viewing that centres on juvenile delinquency, ruthless retrenchments, stifling bureaucracy and marginalised immigrant workers. 'I saw it as a nice opportunity to introduce another side of Singapore to a foreign audience,' says Ong Sor Fern, curator of the series and a film correspondent for The Straits Times. It's a more introspective, colourful Singapore, which I hope will surprise and perhaps even shock people who think of us as sterile and soulless.' The late playwright Kuo Pao Kun is regarded as the artistic voice who first exposed problems in Singaporean society, but a new generation of young filmmakers is bringing the tribulations of the city-state to a wider audience. Jack Neo's I Not Stupid, a bittersweet comedy that documents the struggle of three schoolchildren against Singapore's brutally elitist educational system, was a hit with both social commentators and the general public. It's spawned an equally successful TV series - which was broadcast to rave reviews across the region, including Hong Kong - and a sequel will be on general release in Singapore later this month. I Not Stupid, however, is candyfloss compared with the work of some of Neo's edgier counterparts. Royston Tan's 15, for example, thrives on grittiness rather than gags. The film revolves around five drifting teenagers who struggle to fit into main-stream society, and Tan brazenly condemns how the country abandons - if not creates - a desperate underclass. The same goes for Eric Khoo's 12 Storeys. Made in 1997, the film reveals the dark consequences of Lee Kuan Yew's tightly controlled social experiment as angst explodes within a public housing estate, that symbol of the government's obsession to impose faceless, inhuman order. 'There's a fascination among some young filmmakers with what I call grime glamour,' Ong says. This probably explains the underlying theme of AlieNation, which proclaims in its publicity material that 'in a strange world, nobody is a stranger'. The problems for adults are addressed by Wee Li Lin's short film Holiday, which depicts how a recently laid-off 35-year-old man whiles away his time. It reveals how Singapore's emphasis on the work ethic has stripped its people of direction: with people measuring their worth through economic return, the massive recession of the late 1990s - and the cutbacks it generated - has created a self-doubting, crisis-ridden generation. Tan Pin Pin's Moving House, meanwhile, tackles bureaucracy head-on. Tan examines the trauma of families forced to relocate the remains of their loved ones after officials commandeer a graveyard for so-called urban development. Although a straightforward documentary about the problems communities face as Singapore makes what are said to be inevitable sacrifices in its pursuit of ultra-modernity, it's hard not to view Tan's piece as an indictment of an insensitive, money-first government. And this is where the twist lies: far from being condemned as pariahs - as befell Kuo, who was detained without trial on an outlying island for four years, and had his citizenship removed for 15 - the filmmakers are the darlings of the establishment, the jewels in a crown that the Singaporean government eagerly markets as proof of the city-state's transformation into what it calls a Renaissance city. AlieNation, Jan 12-24, 9pm, Roof Garden, Fringe Club, 2 Lower Albert Rd, Central. Full listings at www.hkfringeclub.com
