SMALL HOURS OF THE NIGHT

Daniel Hui
SMALL HOURS OF THE NIGHT
Singapore 2024, 103’

Singapore, in the late 1960s — the newly independent country is still grappling with its identity. In a dark room, a woman is being interrogated. There are no reverse shots. Through the course of one long night, identities and duration start to blur. Ghosts from the future haunt their conversation. A two-character, black-and-white film to evoke the state’s nascent political legal landscape. “The real-life characters in the film have no names. This was done for safety reasons and also because they could be anyone, even me and you. The shifting of realities and identities - like what happens in a dream - is important for me, because the boundaries between us are always changing and forever being re-negotiated. Just like duration, which can never be segmented and laid out in space, identities are never fixed — they are nebulous, they mutate and undulate, and through the folding and transgressing of their borders, they create history.”