To view the short documentary, “Beyond the Border, Behind the Men”, shown at our info session, click on the link: youtube/watch?v=645GjisI-nA Below is Rui Jie’s winning review on the film: Beyond the Border, Behind the Men (2012) is a Singaporean short film that casts the spotlight on the families of three Bangladeshi men working in Singapore on long-term bases. The cinematography heavily features scenes from the day-to-day lives of these men’s respective families, punctuated regularly with oral accounts and memories of their men in this faraway land. As the film’s online description categorically implies, Singaporeans tend to overlook the lives of these migrant workers. By all accounts, this film evokes in its target audience a good measure of empathic resonance. The bare treatment in presenting the family interviews serves strongly to draw parallels between the lives of ‘us’ and ‘them’. As one witnesses the familiar scene of parents sending their children to school in hopes of giving them a future better than their own, one is inclined to realize that we are not so different after all. Confronted with this presentation, the audience is thus stimulated to consider the struggles of the common migrant worker. In that regard, the film has achieved its purpose. Yet, in the wake of the December riots, the audience may be so inclined to question if such advocacy is enough. While these films tend to nudge at our conscience, their ability to address the social problems comprehensively remains to be seen. Nevertheless, BTBBTM serves as a hopeful reminder that until we are willing to defend the interests of those whom we’ve never met, all of our society’s shining beacons of progress will be for naught.
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 08:36:44 +0000
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