POP AYE made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January, so I'm a little late to the party, but I finally watched this textured charmer of a film at its UK premiere at the London Film Festival about an hour ago. I'm not sure how much I'm adding to the discussion of Singaporean filmmaker Kirsten Tan's incredibly assured first full-length feature, but here goes.

The brisk pace of urban development and buried grief over the loss of nature isn't a new theme in Singapore art-making. In fact, it's not just a preoccupation – it borders on an obsession. I'm more familiar with how this manifests in theatre-making: Jean Tay's play Boom is a ready example of a eulogy for what is lost with redevelopment, as is Haresh Sharma's Still Building, and the theatre company Drama Box has looked at land contestation from a variety of standpoints, with its It Won't Be Too Long trilogy centered around the state's reclamation of a sizeable swathe the 18th-century municipal cemetery Bukit Brown, or its IgnorLAND series focusing each time on a different displaced or overlooked community. Artists have held many farewell events in spaces soon to be demolished, including the cluster of Rochor Centre apartment blocks and an artist takeover at Eminent Plaza. We are always saying goodbye, steeped in a sort of premature nostalgia for what we didn't even have time to love and mourn.

Most of the reviews emerging in the wake of POP AYE's Sundance premiere style the film as a sort of sweet, sentimental buddy road trip between the unlikely pairing of a fading architect and a former circus elephant. It's set in Thailand, where Tan lived for several years, leaping between the thick metropolis of Bangkok and the open idyll of the Thai countryside. Its protagonist Thana, a one-time star architect whose protege seems keen on ousting him, drifts aimlessly between the frustrations of work and the dissatisfactions of domestic life. He's stuck in a long marriage that has come undone over time, but is still caught by surprise when it implodes overnight. He finds his wife's purple vibrator in the bottom of a box on the top shelf of her wardrobe, and sets it down on the coffee table in front of her. She eyes it with both guilt and disdain. And then, after a bitter encounter at work, he takes off early – and instantly recognises Popeye, an elephant with a connection to his childhood, lumbering down a narrow Bangkok alleyway in full circus regalia. Is it guilt that prompts him to buy the elephant back, or is it nostalgia? Is it the innocence of village life he craves, the uncontaminated joy of a childhood he's constructed from memory? Is he trying to reclaim something long lost in the thicket of city life?

As the adorable pair of misfits leave the city and begin their long journey into the countryside on foot, Tan leaves these questions hanging in the air. I think POP AYE isn't a road trip. It's a pilgrimage. It's also a mid-life crisis. It is Tan's homage, from a distance, to a home country that is always changing, that always changes when you leave and return. There is no empty space, no purgatory. Every inch of land has its purpose; if it has no purpose, it is given one. Every Singaporean has a story of a large, overgrown field, once the site of soccer games and kites, parcelled out to make room for multiple sets of condominiums. Tan's camera lingers lovingly on Thailand's lush rural spaces, its rolling fields and pink sunsets. And Thana clings to Popeye, who's either chained or relegated to a multitude of objects in quick succession (a set of shopping carts, a tree, the back of several trucks, followed by a police car, and of course, Thana himself), afraid to let go of the one thing that reminds him that life can still be what it used to be, when it was shinier, and happier. But things fall apart and the centre cannot hold, and as Thana embarks on his kora to look for a home he forgot he lost, he finds that memory can also be a tricky, tricking thing.

POP AYE is Tan's allegory for a Singapore aged 52 and unsure about its history. Setting the story in Thailand – a safe distance away, but close enough to home – makes it feel like more of a parable for Singapore's faulty nostalgia, its unreliable memory of a 'better' past and the meaning it over-invests in symbols and kitsch memorabilia. But POP AYE is also a reminder of Singapore's desperation for the new and the cutting-edge at the expense of everything else. Close to the end of the film, there's an ad for a snazzy new skyscraper by Thana's architectural firm, a showy phallus towering over the rest of the city – not unlike the purple dildo on Thana's coffee table. What is Singapore constantly trying to prove? There's no moralising here, and the film's conclusion is open enough for wide-ranging interpretations.

So much is packed into this warm, meditative film. There are some moments of stasis, but Tan keeps the pair's (mis)adventure moving smoothly as they encounter other misfits who have fallen between the cracks, forgotten as the rest of the country – or anyone younger, prettier, smarter, richer, hungrier – has swept along. Despite some heavy-handed imagery, with the elephant an obvious metaphor for everything from lost innocence to adult loneliness to urban alienation, it's hard not to feel a deep affection for Bong the elephant, seduced by bananas and durians to play the part of Popeye, and his palpable bond with lead actor Thaneth Warakulnukroh (turning in a wonderful, understated performance). POP AYE invites us to take time for ourselves and make time for others, to take detours when we can, to make mistakes and circle back on them, to keep walking.

POP AYE is showing today (October 6, ICA London) and tomorrow (October 7, VUE Leicester Square) as part of the London Film Festival. Tickets available here.

A few months ago, I wrote a personal response to the short film Sweetie Pie by Myanmar film-maker Sai Kong Kham of Tagu Films. The award-winning documentary outfit is based in Yangon. Full disclosure: They are good friends of mine.

When I was little, I loved visiting my grandfather in Malaysia. My grandparents lived in a large, crumbly house with fruit trees in the front yard and, occasionally, an ostrich in the back – all curiosities to us Singaporean city kids. Our grandfather adored us. Whenever we visited it was as if a small toy factory had exploded in his living room. He once bought us a woolly toy dog that could bark – and do back flips. My six-year-old self had never seen anything like it. We clambered onto his lap and made him laugh.

It was not till many years later that I realised my grandfather had been a cantankerous old man. He despised being wrong. He yelled at everyone: his wife, his children, his nurses. And he eventually died, relatively young, from lung failure after blithely chain smoking for most of his life.

These are the fragments of my childhood that I remembered when I watched Sai Kong Kham’s short film Sweetie Pie for the first time two years ago. The old man, sitting still in his favourite chair, with his high, hacking cough; his toddler grandson, the titular Sweetie Pie, crashing through the house, cutting up a banana with a CD and then trying to ride a bicycle indoors. The old man says, “this is my favourite grandchild,” and then realises he’s forgotten his grandson’s name. His terms of endearment, addressed to the silent but hyperactive child, are deliciously foul.

Sai told me that he came across this family by chance. The old tailor, who was 86 at the time, had been an acquaintance of his mentor at the Yangon Film School. The initial idea had been to film a lengthy sit-down interview with the tailor, but the footage turned out to be very dull. The three-year-old boy had always been in the family home, but because of the nature of the “serious” interview, he’d been shooed outside the house. Yet the old man kept calling to his young grandson throughout the interview, and Sai lit on the idea of filming them together. He got rid of the static, formal interview and started from scratch.

In Sweetie Pie, Sai opts for clear binaries and clean juxtapositions and the symbolism can be slightly heavy-handed: the old man sits cloistered away in a dark house, but his young grandson is always framed against the light. But all the elements that have become trademarks of his film-making: the keen observational work, the matter-of-fact visual storytelling, the unobtrusive camera capturing an interviewee’s most relaxed moments – they are all there. His camera work is sharp and poetic at turns, lingering just long enough on a surprising moment or a gorgeous panorama. You see glimpses of this in Sweetie Pie: our perspective shifts to see the house from above, through the spokes of a ceiling fan; and then Sai gives us a tender close-up of the old man, barely breathing, as his grandson tries to wake him from an afternoon nap.

Sai has turned out to have extraordinary chemistry with children. In his award-winning short documentary This Land Is Our Land, about land grabs across Myanmar, the film concludes with a group of excited children telling the camera what they want to be when they grow up – “a cattle herder!” one yells, “firewood collector!”, interrupts another. It is a portrait of rural Myanmar both amusing and deeply affecting, and that same childhood innocence is present in Sai’s earliest film work.

In Sweetie Pie, one realises that it is only the very young and very old – the extremes of mortality – who can get away with anything. The old man threatens his uncomprehending grandson: “I’ll give you a good beating!” but of course, he doesn’t. The old man died a year after the film was made. The seven-minute film compresses an enormous amount of emotion into its short run time. How will this little boy remember his grandfather when he is older? Sweet-tempered, but with a salty vocabulary? Will he even remember these interactions at all?

My family acquired a video camera when I was about seven years old, and my grandfather died three years later, when I was ten. The grainy footage of my grandfather, my sister in his lap, feeding the both of us the best cookies, has helped shade in the gaps in my memory. In the same way, Sweetie Pie crosses from the realm of clinical observer into the living, pulsing world of memory. I’m glad Sai has stuck to that brand of documentary, one that carefully marries fact and emotion. It hits that rare sweet spot.

Originally published here on October 14, 2015 as 'Sweetie Pie: blending documentary and memory'.