Scar on the beach

The first strange thing I noticed when walking into the cinema for SandCastle was that the cinema was dark. After finding the row of my seat, it was so dark that I could not quite make out how many people were sitting between my seat and where I was standing. Sensing my hesitation, someone sitting on the first seat stood up and emerged from the darkness to let me felt my way into the right seat.

I could not help feeling that I was going to watch something secretive until I heard an explanation whispered by a fellow audience in the darkness – ‘no advertisement for this show, so no light’.

After many more audience slowly felt their way into their seats, someone from the cinema must have been informed/reminded and the light came on. I noticed then that it was a full-house on a Sunday afternoon 3.30pm show. A second observation was that average age of the audience was on the high side.

From the moment the movie started, there were sense of familiarity and unfamiliarity, concurrently. Many details of the characters and sceneries were familiar as they are locals, and yet the unforced pacing of story telling that came from a local movie was so unfamiliar for me.

That was the part which I enjoyed Sandcastle the most. Unforced story telling. That was rare (my opinion, of course) by itself alone. To add the fact that the subject involved carried the weights of much washed away collective memories, the restraint in attempting to arrive at an ‘unearthed truth’ had prevented this movie to be  merely a voice of its creator, but a crack on the wall for us the audience to peek into remains of our older generation.

We must have had these curiosity before, sometime in our growing up, when we crossed path with an elderly character who seemed out of tune with the ‘modern, progressive, just, equal, hopeful’ nation that we had been taught to believe in. An elderly relative. An old Chinese language teacher. An opposition party politician. Someone who seem to harbour a bitter feeling against this seemingly perfect nation much admired by the rest of the world. A feeling which we could not quite comprehend when we thought of how much more comfortable our lives had become compared to our parents’.

Some of us might even have similar path as the protagonist of the movie. When an elderly passed away, some old pictures would surface, showing us the yesteryears that our lives evolved from and yet left no trace. We could not do much with the curiosity that comes with these other than letting it subsides as the person who has lived through the stories in the pictures are gone.

All we are left with is a shape which looks like a sandcastle before the tide came and left. Still, these glimpses of our lost years (what this movie stirred up in us) made those ‘national songs’ in the movie (‘Stand up for Singapore’, ‘Home’) completely different songs from themselves when we heard them during national day parade. ‘Home’ sung in the ending credits was so much more heart-felt than Kit Chan’s version, to no fault of Kit.

It is because we finally understand what home means.