Moving House & Walk Walk

Moving House (2001)

The Chew family is one of 55,000 Singapore families forced to relocate the remains of their relatives to a columbarium as the gravesite is needed for urban redevelopment. The picnic mood of the family outing to move the remains belies the sadness and confusion everyone feels.

In February 2001, Discovery Networks Asia made an open call for ideas for documentaries about Asia. They wanted to commission work from emerging Asian documentary filmmakers who would be given a rare opportunity to conceive and produce work for the channel. The open call attracted over 400 pitches. Moving House was one of six documentary ideas chosen to be funded. Moving House was screened in December 2001 throughout Asia. It became the first documentary commissioned by Discovery Channel to be entirely conceptualized, initiated and directed by a Singaporean.

• Runtime: 22 mins
• Country: Singapore
• Film Language: Chinese
• Subtitles: English

 

Walk Walk (2023)

"Walking to make space. Making space to walk."

Three sets of walkers talk about what walking means to them.

Through the use of interviews, archival clips, and documentation footage, walk walk 走走 profiles a range of women from Singapore for whom walking holds different possibilities. While busy homemakers carve out time in their day to walk for friendship and camaraderie, an individual walks in order to hear herself think. Yet another woman walks as a means to extend her art practice and to be seen and heard. The women featured in walk walk create space— both literally and figuratively— for themselves and others as they walk. This video is part of a public art installation where it plays at specially set up screening room in a bus terminal"

• Runtime: 27 mins
• Country: Singapore
• Film Language: Mandarin, English, Teochew
• Subtitles: English

 

Director

Tan Pin Pin

Tan Pin Pin is an award-winning Singapore film director and artist who has spent over two decades chronicling her country’s history, memory and representation in thoughtful and self-reflexive works that have screened theatrically in Singapore and abroad. Her works have been invited to key film festivals: Berlinale, Busan, Hot Docs, SXSW and Visions du Reel. They have been presented in places as diverse as Lincoln Centre, M+, Parasite HK, CUHK, Harvard, Rumah Attap, Sa Sa Art Projects, P-10, Substation, on Singapore Airlines, and on Netflix. She has exhibited at Singapore Biennale, Singapore Art Museum, Thailand Biennale, Jakarta Biennale and at the House of World Cultures, Berlin.

Her work has been honoured with mid-career retrospectives at RIDM in Montreal, Liberation Docfest in Bangladesh, Flaherty Seminar and Dok Leipzig. Pin Pin started her career in the arts as a photographer. When video cameras became more affordable, she made the leap to the moving image after being moved by Taiwanese auteur’s Hou Hsiao Hsien’s City of Sadness. Inspired, she made her first film, Moving House (1996) using borrowed cameras. It is about the exhumation of her great-grandparent’s graves and their remain’s subsequent move to a columbarium. The film got her her first film job as an assistant director for the police drama, Triple Nine, and latterly, a scholarship to study film at Northwestern University, USA. Her graduation film won a Student Academy Award.

Upon her return to Singapore, she made Singapore GaGa (2005) a film about Singapore’s soundscape. It was described as “One of the best films about Singapore” by the Straits Times. It became the first Singapore documentary to have an 8-week sold-out theatrical run. Meanwhile, the citation for the award from Cinema du Reel for Invisible City (2007), her next film, reads, “A witty, intellectually challenging essay on history and memory as tools of civil resistance”. Her short film Pineapple Town (2015), one of seven in the 7 Letters omnibus, was Singapore’s entry to the Oscars. Meanwhile, To Singapore, with Love (2013), a film about Singapore political exiles was banned by Singapore’s censors for undermining National Security. IN TIME TO COME (2017), her next film is an immersive film about Singapore rituals like fire drills and mosquito fogging sessions.

Her latest work, Walk Walk (2023), is a public art installation sited at a bus terminal. The installation consists of a ticket office that has been transformed into a cinema. In it plays a video she made connecting walking and freedom. Together with accompanying text installations, walk walk is the first public art work sited in a bus terminal. walk walk will screen exclusively at the terminal from 2023-2025 five times a day, making it arguably the longest running film in the country.

To support the next generation of documentary producers, Pin Pin was the executive producer of Unteachable (2019). It was the first independent documentary shot in a Singapore secondary school about Singapore’s education system. She has mentored at many documentary development programmes, most recently as a mentor for the Yamagata Documentary Dojo (3 seasons), Japan, and Docs by the Sea, Indonesia (two seasons).

She has been on juries of Taiwan International Documentary Festival, Dok Leipzig, Cinemanila, Jiffest, Busan and DMZDocs amongst others as well as moderated and presented at panels at home and abroad.

She was a Board member of the Singapore International Film Festival, National Archives of Singapore and The Substation. She was also a founding member of filmcommunitysg, an independent film advocacy group in Singapore. In 2018, she is one of two Singaporean directors elected onto the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences, USA. Her work has been purchased by libraries in Lund University, University of Toronto, HKBU, Melbourne University, Harvard, University of Notre Dame amongst others. Pin Pin has an MFA from Northwestern University and an MA Jurisprudence from Oxford University.

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