First, I thought of writing about the movie Narnia, The Lion, the Witch, and the wardrobe … the First film of the series of 3 films is based on a novel with the same name. After assuring that I would write about it soon, my mind suddenly changed to write about a film called “The sleeping dictionary”, Which I watched today eve.
Why? Well, I think it goes with the life encounters I had and observations i did in Singapore while i was working almost 5 years there. The story has a colonial-era timeline where a new British civil officer arrives in Borneo, an East Indonesian Island. Story flows with his interactions with the local community.
The films express the values and simple life of south-east asian people and their cultural, social background, however with relative to the film timeline. But even now, I can see similarities of the humble cultural values even with the modern society—especially countries around this indo-archipelago. (Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar). So if you have a film bucket list, I suggest that you must have this in there too.
Singapore is a relatively new nation, influenced from Malay peninsula, Mainland China and other countries around it. thousands of people from neighbouring countries work there as expats, as domestic workers and labour work force. They have influenced a lot to Singapore as a country and it is a good place to understand a cross cut of the cultures, lifestyles of these people.
For me, I really pleased to get a chance to observe these differences. It makes me to understand that differences between these cultures and its changes over the time. I wish i could write a different article about it.
Last but not least, i must say, all of these cultures, are lovely and added values to our world as these diversity made it vivid and so, beautiful.
