Carin Leong
Carin Leong
Director Carin Leong’s narrative short film debut, Ghost Town, “never went anywhere,” she says, “and it’s nowhere online. It was kind of my love letter to Singapore and all the changes I’ve seen there over the years. [Making it] was therapeutic for me. It didn’t do anything for me careerwise, and I didn’t expect it to.”
A casual moment on the set of that film, however, planted the seed for Leong’s ambitious and elegantly realized climate-themed documentary short Sandcastles, a Field of Vision production that premiered this year at SXSW. Her producer turned to her one shoot day and said, “Hey, do you know there’s a real ghost town called Singapore in Michigan?” “I thought that was funny,” remembers Leong, “then I didn’t think about it for several months.” Later, though, the literal and metaphoric connections between the locations—and the resulting cinematic potential—clicked.
Some form of land reclamation in which Singapore’s land mass is expanded through various measures, including the importation of huge amounts of sand, has occurred in the country for more than 200 years. “I had a baseline knowledge of land reclamation in Singapore, having grown up here,” says Leong, “but it’s one of those things you don’t think much about.” When her producer had mentioned Singapore, Michigan, a once thriving lumber town that, following total deforestation (much of its lumber was used to rebuild Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871), saw its population vanish and then shifting sand dunes bury its remaining buildings, “I saw the parallels, the eerie similarities, between a town buried under sand and a town built on sand,” says Leong.
The short, which will soon be seen as a Vimeo Staff of the Week pick, ping-pongs between Burtynsky-like shots of the two places’ geographies, archival footage and interviews with residents, archaeologists and fishers who discuss both towns’ histories as well as their futures. In Michigan, for example, new development on the dunes threatens to further bury the remains of the old, 19th-century town. Of the small chorus of faces and voices who relay not just history but the emotions associated with an awareness of how sea rise and commercial land development are altering the contours of our physical world, Leong says, “I wanted to look at all these different [aspects of the story] through the eyes of all these different people. We’re all cogs in a machine, really—individual pieces. It’s not anyone’s singular story.”
Sandcastles traversed two stretches of education. The film was originally slated to be Leong’s thesis project at NYU, where she studied filmmaking and business. When the pandemic made the travel required for the short impossible, the project was delayed. “In the delaying process, it kind of took off outside of NYU,” says Leong. “We got a Docs by the Sea lab grant, and then Field of Vision”—which Leong connected with cold through the online submission portal—“came on board, and the budget increased.” About half the funding came, Leong says, from a Singapore International Film Festival grant. As the film’s production was progressing, Leong decided to obtain a master’s at the Columbia School of Journalism in science journalism. “I wanted to get better at taking something academic and making it beautiful and artistic—to speak to something beyond the technical and, for lack of a better word, ‘science-y’ nature of the story.”
Spending her time between Singapore and New York, where she currently works as a multimedia editor at Scientific American, Leong plans to keep her focus on science-themed documentaries. “I came into documentary at the height of the hybrid style,” she says, citing as inspirations the films of Joshua Oppenheimer, Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light and fiction films that display documentary influences, like Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Maborosi. Going forward, she expects to continue making work, whether it be features, docs or audio journalism, that reflects on the big existential themes brought on by our changing environment. “We all have the same bodies,” she says, “we all share the same planet, and we see the universe the same way. There are a lot of universal themes science stories can evoke.”—Scott Macaulay/Image: Farah Jabir
