This article appeared in the April 25, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

This essay was first published in the second issue of MARG1N, a print-only Southeast Asian film magazine based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The annual publication links two Southeast Asian countries, in this case Singapore and Vietnam, under a single theme, and in the magazine’s words, seeks to “introduce curious readers to contemporary pulses, countercultural narratives, and overlooked histories found within the region.” Film Comment is reprinting this piece as part of our series Print Out, which shares exclusive excerpts from journals, magazines, and other indie publications from around the world. 

A Land Imagined (Yeo Siew Hua, 2018)

Some new friends in Buenos Aires were curious about my work. In good humor, I decided to put on A Land Imagined (2018). While rewatching it after several years, I saw the film through fresh and naïve eyes. I must have felt a warmth about it, like an old friend on screen was greeting the new companions beside me. By the time this old friend had to take her leave, I realized that she had already been dead for a while and for a brief moment, I had been communing with a ghost.

Only a handful of years have passed since the film was made, but many of its locations are gone. A third of the film was shot at a cybercafé, which has been taken over by new gentrification that has left little of Singapore untouched. I am amused at the idea that one day I will be asked to explain what that joint was: what the purpose of a cybercafé was, and how we used to skip class to hide ourselves in this virtual escape that reeked of stale cigarettes and unshowered gamers.

If even a cybercafé could not survive, then what must be the fate of the rest of the locations of my film—its land-reclamation sites where migrant workers toiled? Their labors are just as imported as the land they were consigned to work on.

Since its colonial period, a quarter of Singapore’s overall land mass consists of reclaimed land. These vast areas of shifting sand, now covered with towering edifices, used to be bodies of water when I was growing up. What appear as desolate wastelands in A Land Imagined are in fact sites of grand potential, the sandy foundations of national imaginations. These sites of construction, of works in progress, of transformations, no longer exist. They never existed in the first place, remaining stillborn.

Even the austere worker dormitories, which are still tucked away in the industrial west where birds don’t lay eggs (as the Chinese saying goes), are not spared from this encroaching vanishing. After all, they were built for the sole purpose of a provisional interim—a stopgap, a layover, a netherworld. Much like the setting of the film, the migrant workers have disappeared. Those who were featured in A Land Imagined, singing their merry tunes of homesickness and melancholy, are nowhere to be found. They came, they worked, and they left.

During the pandemic, most migrant workers were repatriated and faced difficulties returning, replaced by the ever-renewable, disposable, fungible cogs of a churning system—a reincarnation of death and rebirth. This transmigration of souls took place without faces and nostalgia, as seen by the new demographics of migrants: Cambodians replaced the Filipinos, Vietnamese replaced the Chinese.

So I watch on with the sinking sense of a passing and a peaceful resignation to the inevitable, as one would observe a graveyard at dawn. In Singapore, where the acceleration of renewal surpasses the cementation of memory and identity, I realized what I ended up capturing on camera is not so much a document of the present but an archive of the past.

As then–Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong mentioned in his 2009 National Day Rally speech, “From the Singapore River to Marina Bay, we have totally transformed Singapore over the last half century . . . so that in another 50 years, we will have built another Singapore which is equally unimaginable today.” This is the commitment of a swift government. I find it hard to keep track of the changes, getting lost like a tourist in my own country. Which street corner did I have my first kiss on? Where did I break down and cry when my dog died? When places have moved on and all that are left are traces, our past becomes an ephemeral scent.

In the same speech, the prime minister highlighted key problems faced by the country. One was about the brain drain due to our inability to keep bright young Singaporeans from wanting to leave the country. The irony was not lost on me. Don’t get me wrong, I love my country… probably more than it loves me.

This disappearing landscape is not exclusive to the little island state of Singapore. The powers that rule over most of Southeast Asia aren’t as interested in conservation or preservation as they are in power-grabbing and playing catch-up with their colonial captors, living as ghosts in the wake of their absence. The region is changing. Death is everywhere. The stench of new life is in bloom. No one is mourning. What remains are photographic specters—a haunting of things once embodied, reflected, projected, and remembered.

They say we live among ghosts, and that every time we make a film, it is always already a death. And every now and then, when an old friend pays us an unexpected visit, we are reminded again why films live on long after what has come to pass. Maybe I should go about as though mourning the dead whenever I make films, and not forget that whenever we come together in the darkness of the cinema and revel in the play of phantom shadows, a séance is in progress.

Yeo Siew Hua is the writer and director of A Land Imagined (2018) and Stranger Eyes (2024).