Resource contributed by: Theophilus Kwek

Lei Yuan Bin, I DREAM OF SINGAPORE, 2019, 78 min

“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 ♥ SINGAPORE” shirt. Having paid the average US$10,000 “migration fee,” another fresh-faced youngster arrives, eager to try his luck here too. All this while, a social worker is busy helping the transient-worker community in Singapore. He journeys to Bangladesh – the motherland of the majority of Singapore’s construction workers – 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 Asia’s richest. As ever-towering skyscrapers built by low-wage, indebted labourers rise, an unexpected, empathetic bond blossoms between injured migrant worker Feroz and his social worker, Ethan. In supposedly first-world countries like Singapore, as basic human rights are casually dismissed for rampant capitalism, Ethan goes beyond the call of duty to help send his “brother” off to a new, undreamt-of life.”