European Premiere | In Competition | White Mulberry Award Candidate | Online
Singapore, 2025, 82’, English, Mandarin, Hokkien
Directed by: Michael Kam
Screenplay: Michael Kam
Cinematography (color): Jeremy Lau
Editing: Charliebebs Gohetia
Production Design: Javeus Toh
Music: Michael Asmara
Sound: Cheng Lijie
Producers: Yeo Zhi Qi, Tang Kang Sheng, Angelina Marilyn Bok
Production Companies: Waking Life Pictures, Screentone, Kalehu
Cast: Lim Kay Tong, Kristin Tiara, Richard Low, Vincent Tee
Date of First Release in Territory: TBA
Directed and written by Michael Kam, author of award-winning short films,
The Old Man and His Car is his first feature film: an elegy on old age, quietly intense, melancholic yet capable of opening up to an uplifting close. The central figure, so frequent in Eastern cinema, of the solitary, silent and irritable old man, may recall, among recent films,
Diamonds in the Sand by Janus Victoria (and in
The Old Man and His Car too there is a marginal reference to a case of
kodokushi, solitary death in an apartment, which played an important role in the Filipino director’s film).
In Singapore, widowed former teacher Tan Cheng Hock (the acclaimed Singaporean actor Lim Kay Tong) has sold his flat to move to Canada to live with his son, handing over his money to him; his preference for his son has estranged Hock from his younger daughter. He still has to sell his champagne-coloured Mercedes (the car is itself almost a character), of which he is possessive because it materialises his past dreams. But a bitter disappointment lies in store for Hock.
On a journey to the brink of suicide and back, Hock finds an unexpected human connection with the elderly transgender woman June, who had approached him – somewhat shocking him – to buy the car. This almost co-protagonist figure is portrayed with measured intensity (and great dignity) by Kristin Tiara, who had already starred in the role of a transgender woman in Kam’s short film
Kristin dan Kuching Kuchingnya in 2023.
To appreciate the film’s everyday realism and clarity of vision, the episode of the policeman is exemplary: Hock had been the coach and idol of his deceased brother; he does not remember him at all, but he pretends otherwise out of opportunism: “How many goals did we score?”; “He was the goalkeeper, sir.” Or think of the astonishing “verbal duel” between Hock and an elderly window washer (Vincent Tee) who he had previously offended; the attempt at reconciliation turns into a clash of opposing maxims in English and Chinese.
The heart of the film is memory, which is expressed in snippets of home movies (his son and daughter as children and his late wife) in the “sunlit” and grainy colours of Super 8, in contrast with the beautiful, crisp images of the present in Jeremy Lau’s cinematography. These fragments of family footage represent the subjectivity of memory, as a regret for time gone by and a bitter contrast with the present: this is shown in a small scene in a venue, when they are triggered by Hock’s saddened observation of a young man with his small son.
His friend and former colleague, Seng, also prompts journeys into memory. His talkative nature forms an amusing contrast with the taciturn Hock (Seng is played by Richard Low, who has appeared in various comedies by Jack Neo). In a remarkable passage, Seng recalls the brilliant career of a mutual friend now broken by Alzheimer’s. A vanished past is met with Hock’s muted anger, Seng’s somewhat superficial resignation, or June’s deeper, more heartfelt acceptance.
Like Chinese boxes, the film, while maintaining a strict focus on Hock, opens up to glimpses of other lives that do not benefit from interior imagery but are expressed through the dimension of storytelling. June’s recollection of the bygone days of Bugis Street is memorable: those celebrated by Yonfan in
Bugis Street: The Movie, with the explosion of nightlife as evening fell, the shows and beauty contests of trans and drag queens (sponsored, she recalls, by surgeons), fleeting romances, and prostitution. It is precisely June’s current difficult life, as an immigrant who has remained in Singapore to care for her senile mother, that becomes a lesson in humanity and resilience for Hock. The emotional climax of the film is a powerful final dialogue between him and June, in the park at night, an absolutely remarkable sequence both for its dialogue and its framing. The two of them in the foreground, walking through the park, moving away from the car left in the background with its headlights on, and the light of the headlights silhouetting their bodies in backlight: an image that conveys the
sense of truth of the entire film.
Michael Kam
Michael Kam is a director, screenwriter, producer and a film teacher in Singapore. For the making of The Old Man and His Car he relied on the help of several former students in the crew. He is the author of various short films, presented at festivals around the world, in which the theme of family is central. Among the awards he has won are the Singapore Short Film Awards in 2011 for Masala Mama and in 2014 for Detour, which also won Best Fiction at the 45th Tampere Film Festival. In his fifties, Kam directed his first feature film, The Old Man and His Car, which had its world premiere at the 38th Tokyo International Film Festival.
FILMOGRAFIA
2010 – Masala Mama (short)
2013 – Detour (short)
2017 – melodi (short)
2020 – Nursey Rhymes (short)
2025 – The Old Man and His Car