Eating Air

A hot summer in Singapore. Thew girl divides her time between two holiday jobs: during the day she works in a copy shop where she collects snippets of paper, in the evening she helps her mother sell papers by the roadside. The boy has been on holiday all his life. As a notorious truant, he hangs around with his friends and is mainly involved with his motorbike, a gleaming second-hand 125cc. They meet when, on one of his nocturnal rambles, he sees her sitting under a street lamp for someone to take her with him. For him robbing a shop is just as exciting as racing through fluorescent tunnels with a girl on the back. For her, racing down the highway is just as scary as the mysterious messages he gets from his friends. In other words, they tumble into a romance. The story is told with pictures more than with dialogue. The secret fantasies of the boy are colourfully visualised: like a samurai he creates a bloodbath in the kitchen of his parental home. His friends’ tall stories are told in flashbacks, while the boring work in the copy shop is illustrated by monotonous actions and lengthy silences. Bright colours, movements and expression further dominate the film. Eating Air wants to communicate a feeling, of the lust for life, of the suffocating intoxicating feeling of being in love, of freedom from worries and camaraderie.