Alternative vision in neoliberal Singapore: Memories, places, and voices in the films of Tan Pin Pin

Moving House revolves around an extended family that has to deal with the exhumation of its ancestors’ buried remains in rapidly urbanizing Singapore. In 2005, the fortieth year after Singapore’s Independence, Discovery Networks Asia produced a three-episode documentary on Singapore that did not involve Tan Pin. The Singapore state has privatized several public enterprises, liberalized the financial and legal sectors, and deregulated parts of the economy in ways that have been beneficial to inward direct foreign investors. Singapore’s embrace of neoliberal globalization has also led, directly or indirectly, to national problems. Rapid neoliberal globalization has also been marked by indiscriminate destruction of the natural and built heritage in order to build a new – erasing, silencing, marginalizing, and forgetting in an uncompromising and mostly undemocratic process of economic development and nation building.