The Global Migrant Festival 2020 is a cultural festival held every two years, comprising of thirty online events held over the course of nine days. The Festival is a showcase of diversity, featuring over two hundred participants from around the world. This year’s festival will be held online, and will be from the 21st of November till the 29th of November 2020. The Festival therefore seeks to use the Arts as a medium to allow low wage migrant workers and refugees to have their voices heard and their stories told, humanising their experiences in the process. This therefore allows for a discussion of intersectional issues related to migration, including, but not limited to, health, economics, safety, art and gender.           

The Festival features various forms of literature including prose and poetry, photography, music, plays, academic narratives, art and film. Furthermore, the Festival features the Finals of the Singapore Migrant Workers Poetry Competition and Malaysia Refugee and Migrant Worker Poetry Competition, a yearly affair that showcases the poetic talent of migrant workers and refugees.

For more information on the event line-up, please visit Global Migrant Festival official website:

https://www.globalmigrantfestival.com/festival-events

All events will be streamed live on the Festival’s Facebook page:

https://www.facebook.com/events/278475959974910

New Word Order Showcase: The Drawing Room & Episodes from Art Studio by Liao Jiekai
2016 | 16 mm | approximately 20 minutes | PG13

The Drawing Room & Episodes from Art Studio is a filmic exploration of the text, characters and narratives from Yeng Pway Ngon’s novel, Art Studio. The film meditates on the practice of life drawing, and moves from the snug art studio to the wide corridors of the newly opened National Gallery Singapore. Chapters of Singapore Modern Art adorn the freshly painted walls of the gallery, and conjure stories of the passing generation portrayed in Yeng’s Art Studio.

The Drawing Room & Episodes from Art Studio is the first programme to be presented under the revamped New Word Order. The session will feature a post-show discussion with the director Liao Jiekai, as well as two other short films by Liao, Silent Light and Before the Wedlock House.

Silent Light
2015 |16 mm | 11:45 mins | PG

Liao Jiekai experiments with the texture of expired film stock and ponders upon death and memories in Silent Light. Sequences of his grandmother’s funeral are accompanied by an elderly voice reminiscing on growing up in Singapore in the 1940s. The hypnotic rhythm is accentuated by the imperfection of the film stock, which contributed to the kaleidoscope of emotions evoked with the passing of time, as a mourner and lone moth anticipate the silent light of daybreak.

Before the Wedlock House
2012| High Def Video (4:3) |15 minutes | PG

In Before the Wedlock House, Liao Jiekai documented the last moments of his cousin in the room she grew up in on her wedding day. In the first short film made after his feature Red Dragonflies, Liao continues to explore what it means to come of age in Singapore through candid exchanges with the bride, revealing an incisive portrait of young people and their ideals.