A Land Imagined

Lok, an overtired detective about to retire, investigates the disappearance of a Chinese building worker in Singapore after the man, Wang, suddenly fails to turn up on the construction site. Lok and a colleague start looking into Wang’s life to find out what happened to him. To do so, they find themselves in a part of the city they don’t know: where anonymous building workers live in shabby hostels, around endless rows of cranes in the night. This is the army of invisible, underpaid migrants with no rights who still help the new Singapore to rise.

In his feature debut, with its changing perspectives, both the lonely worker and the Singapore detective see the dark side of this booming metropolis. How do the disillusioned workers survive here? Although the two lives in this neo-realistic drama in a film-noir style are distant from each other, Lok and Wang also have something in common: exhausting insomnia and vivid (day)dreams about a different life.