During the early 1980s, Tan Chu Boon was arrested and sentenced to prison for erecting a “subversive tombstone” for his brother, a political dissident who was put to death in Malaysia. On his brother’s tombstone, Tan engraved words eulogizing his brother as a martyr of the people. For this reason, the court convicted him on the grounds of engraving “an inscription which tended to advocate acts prejudicial to the security of Singapore.”
Using this anecdote as a starting point, this film will go on to explore the different consequences of being dead in Singapore, a country where one is never exempt from bureaucracy and censorship, even after death. No one, not even the founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, is exempt.
These events have made me realize that the predominant mode of being in Singapore is pure madness. To show this state of mind, this documentary has to be infected by madness as well. The film will start out as a conventional “talking-heads” documentary. Throughout the course of the film, however, both the interviewees and the interview topics will become more and more bizarre, until the form of the film starts to devour itself and unravel endlessly into delirium.
Daniel Hui
