About the Film
Most crime films — with their plots, victims and perpetrators — take place within one cursed circle of cunning and conspiracy. However, Singaporian director Yeo Siew Hua takes A Land Imagined to a wider plane of conscience. Here, the complex story features an investigative officer and a Chinese immigrant worker, who never meet, but communicate through different intermediary characters. Some of them are involved in the disappearance of the strange young man, while others are trying to escape the dire circumstances that brought them to a treacherous land where they had expected a life of dignity, only to realize they are victims of slavery and bloodshed.
A Land Imagined, which won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival last August, poses a crucial question: in a world where borders are no longer barriers, seducing millions to migrate to foreign lands; is this era of technological advancement founded on principles that are nothing but hollow shells, opening the door to murder and humiliation?
First and foremost, this is a film about places. It moves across geographies to shed light on the lives of people who are marginalized and oppressed. Detective Lok is a lonely man who suffers from insomnia, which causes him to be in a zombie-like state. He doesn’t talk much and rarely favors violence. He is a well-intentioned man who seeks the truth, and therefore trapped in places that are rotten and empty, like a savage setting guarded by factories and dirty skies.
Wang, the Chinese worker, stands in solidarity with a group of Bengali workers, before he has to defend one of them against the manager of the quarry where they work. Wang’s disappearance is the beginning of a rough journey for the detective; it starts in the foreign workers’ decrepit chambers and ends with a dance on the beach, as he wonders: what kind of horror is this, robbing us blind of our humanity?
Ziad Al Khozai
