PŌTOCOL

Shy and sweet-natured Zijie spends his time learning the art of fencing and listening to his widowed mother, Ai Ling, sing at a local nightclub. When Zijie’s older brother Zihan – a three-time national fencing champion – is released from juvenile prison, Zijie remains intent upon seeing him, despite his mother’s wishes. As Zihan starts mentoring his younger brother, their bond strengthens. But as Zijie develops newfound skills as a fencer and a romance with his teammate blossoms, Zihan’s innocence becomes more questionable.

Life is not the most fulfilling for sixteen-year-old Meng: Lounging at home with his grieving father on a daily basis, being excluded from his family’s past, and forced into bullying other kids at school. Everything changes when he is thrown into a life-altering adventure that propels him into an exciting unfamiliar landscape.

After a Vietnamese woman dies in a car crash in Saigon, her brother-in-law and her young son transport her body back to the former’s hometown in rural Vietnam, where they plan to give her a funeral.

Yangon, Myanmar, in 2022, is in the midst of a civil war following the military coup on February 1, 2021. Mi-Thet, a young Burmese woman, works in a garment factory in Yangon, far from her native village. Wages have not been paid for the past two months, and a group of workers are leading a strike. But soon, the strikers are attacked by the henchmen of the military regime, leaving Mi-Thet terrified by her past trauma.

Following the unexpected demise of a stranger while at work, a repair technician spirals into facing the reality of his own mortality.

A young man is working as a housekeeper in an empty mansion. When its owner returns to start his mayoral election campaign, the young man bonds with him and defends him when his campaign is vandalized, setting off a chain of violence.

Ami, haunted by recurring apparitions, embarks on a journey from Singapore to Japan in search of her missing mother. Amidst the transforming landscapes, Ami's dreams, hauntings and lost mother unveil their true form.

A mainland Chinese filmmaker, exiled to Hong Kong for her politically-charged work, reunites with her mother on a trip to Taiwan.

In the cold west, Motel Acacia is tasked with exterminating immigrants by the government through a BED, haunted with the spirit of a Filipino tree demon, that eats men and impregnates women. A young Filipino man, JC, is groomed by his tyrannical caucasian Father to take over the business.

An assistant professor at a medical college balances her roles as a professional, a mother and a teacher. Her life changes once she witnesses an unexpected incident involving a female student.

With her family on the cusp of change and separation, a filmmaker questions the meaning of her given name, her place among her four sisters, and their stories.

The Chinese police visit head-teacher Chen at home. Her daughter, a dissident filmmaker living in Hong Kong, plans yet another critical film about China's colonization of the small autonomous territory. The authorities demand that Chen travel to her daughter to stop the film project. What they do not take into account is that Chen and her daughter lost contact long ago.

Something has gone wrong for a typical Singaporean family. After a man loses his job and the respect of his wife and teenage son, he tries to reconnect with his family by taking them on a trip to visit a childhood haunt. Now abandoned and falling apart, the place is nothing like he thought it would be—especially not the ghosts of his past lying in wait. 

In the forest of copper columns, a man performs a ritual of cleansing.

Absent Smile is a loving document of Clang’s parents and their mixed feelings of longing yet support for their son. Using the age-old format of family portraiture augmented with digital means, the spectral quality of absent family members projects a tentative reunion across time and space.

During the pandemic, the filmmaker’s son found himself stuck at home for a very long time. Ying Liang watched him cut out a portrait of Abbas Kiarostami from a book, and create a face mask on the face of the Iranian filmmaker. Liang observes how his son builds a ‘world’ on his bed, makes a paper airplane, and flies various places with his new friend Abbas Kiarostami. After spending the whole day flying, he falls asleep on that same bed with the family’s kitten. In his dreams, he uses the ‘magic’ he has learned from an online magic course to remove the face mask. With The World of Mindfulness, Chinese filmmaker Liang – who is now living in Hong Kong – creates a marvellously simple piece about the world of childhood, adding a touch of playful cinephilia.

The Age of Revelation tells the tale of a mythic figure who wanders through the world and observes the slowly growing disconnection between humanity, nature, and humanity’s innate spirituality. A sound-film collaboration between SAtheCollective and filmmaker Liao Jiekai as part of an artist commission by the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre, this film features choreography by performance artist Effendy Ibrahim and participation by local performers and dance artists as the cast.

Lost while visiting the graves of his ancestors, the protagonist finds his future self. Together, they embark on a journey of retracing the places their family would visit during the Qing Ming festival of tomb-sweeping. Inspired by the poetry and in memory of Yeng Pway Ngon (1947–2021).

Donna Ong is an installation artist, best known for her evocative and thought-provoking and often complex environments made from furniture, found objects and original artwork.