Month: April 2025

  • Above And Below The Ground (2023)

    Film Review by Zhi Ming Sim

    Screenshots from the trailer

    On 4th April 2025, Function 8 hosted the screening of Above and Below the Ground, a powerful film directed by Emily Hong, documenting the everyday lives of communities implicated by the Myitsone Dam in Kachin. The screening was followed by a Q&A session with the director, offering insights into the creative and political reflections behind the documentary.

    The film opens with an image of Myanmar rendered as a thumping heart of Southeast Asia. The Irrawaddy River pulses through the landscape, representing both a figurative and literal source of culture, sustenance, and life for communities. The film features indigenous women and environmental activists who are challenging the construction of the dam—a joint venture between Myanmar’s military junta and a Chinese-owned megacorporation. The dam has since displaced thousands, removing them from their livelihoods, and bound to submerge villages, causing ecological damages along the Irrawaddy.

    Capturing ongoing local resistance through music and karaoke, everyday conditions, protests, and legal confrontations, the film offers a poetic and political disruption to extractive narratives of hydro-dam projects that often position indigenous communities as idle and necessitating modernization. The film importantly puts its audience into rethinking the wider consequences of green developmental projects in the region, and how transnational capital and global corporate interest work at the expense of life.

    During the Q&A session, participants asked about how Singaporeans can show solidarity with the environmental movement in Myanmar, especially in the aftermath of the earthquake that rattled through Sagaing and Mandalay. Director Hong emphasizes the possibilities and importance of transnational solidarities and getting engaged with local initiatives that support communities on the ground. In reflecting on the dialogues from the session, Singaporeans must ground solidarities through active accounting for and refusal of our own complicities in extractive investments and to center indigenous voices as vital sources of knowledge for shaping regional projects.

    from FreedomFilmFest 2024 programme booklet

  • Arresting Teenagers Under The ISA

    Teo Soh Lung

    Minister K Shanmugam was met by reporters at the doorstep of Masjid Maarof a few days ago when he disclosed that a 15 year old girl was served with a Restriction Order in February 2025 for allegedly supporting and pledging allegiance to ISIS through a chatbot and a 17 year old boy was served with a Detention Order in March 2025 for “far right extremist” thoughts. The boy was allegedly a contact of Nick Lee Xing Qiu who has been in detention since November 2024.

    The minister did not reveal when these two young people were arrested. Since the ISA allows a person to be arrested and detained for 30 days without having to be produced in court or served with a detention order, it is likely that the girl was arrested and detained in January 2025 for about 30 days and the boy in February 2025.

    What do I make of the minister’s disclosure of the latest young victims of the ISA? Several online commentators speculated that the intention of the minister was to distract the attention of Singaporeans from the embarrassing problem created by former NMP Calvin Cheng who on his Facebook, promised to buy pro Palestinian activists business class air tickets to Gaza and shoes provided they do not return to Singapore. There was also the mysterious act of Minister Vivian Balakrishnan who apparently “liked” Cheng’s post but later retracted, claiming that he was not responsible for the “like”.

    I leave aside all these speculations. For now, I want to say that Minister Shanmugam’s revelation of the two young victims of the ISA at the doorstep of a mosque is shocking and is a veiled threat to all of us. Arresting and detaining a person under the ISA is a very serious matter. Why did he make the announcement so informally and at the doorstep of a mosque? Why didn’t he issue a press statement as was his ministry’s practice? Will this be his new practice for announcing arrests and detentions under the ISA?

    Reading the transcript of his interview, I draw the conclusion that the minister is proud of the fact that he possesses the power to arrest and detain any person without having to show evidence of the alleged threat such a person pose to Singapore or Singaporeans. He said:

    “… Thanks to the framework of laws we have in the Internal Security Act and the way we take a zero tolerance approach. For us, WE DON’T WAIT UNTIL YOU ACTUALLY ARE ABOUT TO DO SOMETHING – YOU ARE THINKING OF, DOING SOMETHING YOU ARE PLANNING, WE THINK THAT YOU HAVE REACHED THE STAGE OF, YOU KNOW, GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT TO DO, WE MOVE IN. (Emphasis in uppercase mine). We have a variety of orders, restriction orders – so you are not detained, detention orders where it is more serious and you need to be taken in.

    … ISD tries its best to keep track of people with these sorts of thoughts. But the large, very significant way, Singapore is largely a peaceful place between races, between religions. Harmony, we emphasise that. We are integrated in the way we live, in the way we go to schools, in the way we work. We have to make sure that we keep it going. The beautiful thing about Singapore is that you can go about your lives peacefully. That is the essence of your question. So, we have to try and preserve that way of life.”

    Can the minister and the ISD read the minds of each and everyone of us? Are they super psychiatrists and psychologists who can never be wrong in their assessment? He claims: “The beautiful thing about Singapore is that you can go about your lives peacefully.”

    My question is who is the “you” in this statement? The “you” does not refer to the young victims or their families. They are in big trouble. Their families are in turmoil. While they are unable to proclaim their innocence because they have been restricted or detained indefinitely, the minister and his people can enjoy their lives as if nothing has happened. It is clear to me that the “you” does not refer to you or me. It refers to them, the PAP. We are all subjected to their expertise in mind-reading.

    Must all Singaporeans live in fear of being arrested and detained under the ISA for thoughts of overthrowing the PAP even if such an event happen through the ballot box? If this is what the minister wants to tell us, it is better that we give our votes to the opposition so that he can be humbled and stop misusing his massive power.