Above And Below The Ground (2023)

Film Review by Zhi Ming Sim

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.