Charmaine Poh

Monica scours archive material for answers to the question of how queer life in Berlin and the wish to be accepted by their Christian-Indonesian parents can be reconciled.

A short film following a queer, revisionist narrative, taking as its core the story of Andra, a former MTV VJ and host in Indonesia from 2007-2011. Using humour, performance, and poetry, Andra tracks their evolution from a young, rising star in Bandung to a non-binary transmasculine adult living a private life as a kindergarten teacher in Berlin. The film maps the limits of expression in the early 2000s media imaginary and the gendered constraints that Andra often found themselves in, as well as the slow unlearning of their identity.

This hybrid documentary film proposes a safe space for queer life in Singapore.

The film is a glimpse of queer parenthood in Singapore. It combines interview material with a constructed communal space for play and imagination. It presents queerhood as an open field of possibility, one brimming with life that is yet to come.

The video uses as its basis found footage and material of the artist’s time as a preteen TV actor in the early 2000s in Singapore, a time of an unregulated internet and nascent image distribution. Through the use of a deep-fake, the video resurrects the series character, E-Ching, to address the politics of the gaze, the femme-presenting body, and agency. By compressing time and space, the eternal 12-year-old E-Ching offers a revisionist narrative that holds a yearning for freedom.