12 Storeys

The film takes place in a block of public housing flats. The place is Singapore and the span is a single day. A young man living in the block takes his own life. After that the story goes into three separate flats. San San lives alone. Her mother’s voice never leaves her head, always finding fault. She feels she is worth nothing. Ah Gu sells tofu soup. His wife Lily came from another country. She is unhappy with life in Singapore and does not hide it. The distance between them widens by the day. Meng, for his part, hands out moral lessons at every turn. The way his teenage sister May lives drives him to distraction. She will not study and is out at night. What the film shows is how thin the thing called neighbourliness can be. It screened in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 1997. It was the first Singaporean film taken there. Jack Neo and Boon Pin Koh appear in the hundred and five minute film, a Singaporean production Eric Khoo finished in 1997.