Snow City

From the aquarium to the artificial toboggan run, from the motorway tunnel inaugurated in high heels and great pomp to the gleaming office buildings, Snow City seems at first to be no more than a series of discreetly bizarre images. But soon the flawless urban fabric of Singapore, with its green spaces skilfully laid out between glass towers, broadens out to include the fringes that only a filmmaker’s eye can reveal. Among the estuary’s detritus, at the foot of the luxuriant trees that hide the city skyline, a closer look at the stones reveals fragments of concrete, tiles shattered into a thousand pieces, possibly the rubble from a district now wiped off the map. Through the contrasting places and activities filmed and the varying scale of shots, this charade-like film (where a swimming polar bear is juxtaposed with the systematic dousing of worksite trucks) finally lends muffled irony to the so-called “garden city” of this city state – which is more like a “snow city”, a chilled and chillingly functional city.