Close Encounters

Eric Khoo Looks Back at His Film-making Career and Lead Characters, and Charts His Next Spine-tingling Chapter

- Hong Xinyi

FOR THOSE WHO CAME OF AGE IN THE 1990S, THE POPULAR imagination of those years pulsed with a sort of vivid ennui. Even as the era’s blockbusters dazzled with new digital wizardry, independent cinema was entering a new golden age. Its auteurs—the likes of Quentin Tarantino, Richard Link later and Wong Kar Wai—became the arbiters of cool, and their distinctive visual languages shaped the emotional palette of a whole generation.

In Singapore, where a once-thriving film industry dominated by Shaw Brothers and Cathay-Keris had withered by the late 1970s, everyone had gotten used to not having movies of our own. And then, suddenly, there was Eric Khoo. This year marks the 20th anniversary of his sophomore feature film, 12 Storeys, which featured interwoven stories about the residents of a single HDB block. From a distance of decades, it can be difficult to convey how strange and compelling it was in 1997 to see Singapore reflected back to us in a film that had no interest in glossy surfaces or nation-building platitudes. Quite the opposite, in fact—the flats, coffee shops and playgrounds in its universe were tinged with grit, grime and no small measure of gloom, painting a different portrait of Singapore’s journey from third world to first. It was a moody meditation, in a minor key.