I Dream of Singapore (2019)

• 60%
• 2019
• Documentary
• Lei Yuan Bin

After a life-threatening injury, a construction worker lies endlessly in wait to return home. A migrant poet-labourer leads students in dreaming of an afternoon river. One Muslim devotee cries while praying, wearing his "I [HEART] SINGAPORE" shirt. Having paid the average EUR10,000 "migration fee," another fresh-faced youngster arrives, eager to try his luck here too. All this while, a social worker helping the transient-worker community in Singapore journeys to their motherland, Bangladesh, discovering deep pain and promise. The heartfelt, observational documentary I DREAM OF SINGAPORE interweaves the natural worlds and cityscapes of Bangladesh and Singapore. It poetically observes the broken bodies, stoic faces, surveilled dormitories, and sprawling construction sites that make up the migrant-labour flow from one of the world's poorest countries to one of the richest. As ever-towering skyscrapers built by low-wage, indebted labourers rise, an unexpected, empathetic bond blossoms between injured migrant worker Feroz and his case worker, Ethan. Even as basic human rights are casually dismissed for rampant capitalism in "first-world" countries like Singapore, Ethan goes beyond the call of duty to help send his "brother" off to a new, undreamt-of life.