Fridae

An artist returns to Singapore to hold a solo exhibition. Returning to a greatly changed urbanscape and catching up with acquaintances she used to be close to, she remembers a year in her childhood spent trekking in the dense Bukit Timah forest, trawling the night markets, and visiting book cafés with these same friends.

Liao Jiekai’s indie effort Red Dragonflies is a film where nothing much happens – there is no character or plot development that leads to a catharsis, no three act structure or character arc that neatly package a story with a moral.

Working on a thematic level, the open-ended and loosely structured film has more affinity with a film installation, and is similar in approach to Brian Gothong Tan’s Invisible Children. Here, the leisurely anti-story storytelling allows the themes of Red Dragonflies to slowly seep through.

Liao is interested in the concepts of ‘nostalgia’ and ‘sentimentality’ and how these feelings are an after-the-fact realisation, a form of re-cognition. Only because the past is lost and irretrievable does it takes on a magical sheen. It is this keening for a lost past that permeates ever second of Red Dragonflies, whether we see the artist stumble around Singapore like a stranger in a strange land, her memories of her childhood self traipsing the sights and sounds of a recent Singapore, or realise that those sights and sounds of her childhood were themselves echoes of an older, lost past (as with the abandoned railway in Bukit Timah).

A meditative film, Red Dragonflies is best appreciated as a feature length version of a video installation.