What do a demon-filled video game, 30,000 photographs of cloudless skies and a dead sparrow have in common?

You can encounter all three at this year’s Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF). The sparrow, incidentally, makes its appearance in the hands of a master puppeteer, who makes it seem to fly again.

Intrigued? Undercurrent, now in its sixth edition, is the section of SGIFF where cinema meets performance and  sound art. This year’s programme offers plenty to get curious about, whether you’re a seasoned festival-goer or simply looking for an art experience that’s a little out of the ordinary.

Here are four highlights to get you started.

1. Watch a video game come to life

 

How often do we rely on digital technologies to shape our understanding of the world without even realising it? London-based artist Shaheer Tarar explores this question in The Compression Zone, a live video game that combines fantasy, geography and his own childhood experience of migrating from Pakistan to Canada.

Follow the artist as he navigates a fantasy dungeon inhabited by demons and representations of compression algorithms which offer to make digital information easier and faster to access, but at a price.

Don’t mistake this work for a conventional video game, though, because it is not. Tarar performs the game live, guiding audiences through a world which he continues to update at every performance.  Reflecting on the advent of the internet, Tarar’s work also examines how digital technology has transformed our ability to visualise distant places and make sense of how different places are connected.

 

2. Lose yourself in cloudless skies and experimental sound

 

Another offering at this year’s Undercurrent section is a double bill featuring Japanese filmmaker Takashi Makino’s Imagination and Australian sound artist Lawrence English’s The Rest is my Ghost.

If the meditative experience of watching nothingness sounds appealing to you, then Makino’s Imagination is one to look forward to. For the artist, nothingness is not necessarily emptiness. Drawing upon his own experience with meditation and ideas on Zen philosophy, he regards nothingness as a space of possibilities, where the audience is invited to discover images for themselves in something that contains almost nothing.

The 34-minute moving-image work combines more than 30,000 photographs of cloudless skies taken from the rooftop of Japan’s oldest film developing laboratory, with found, developed-but-unexposed 35mm and 16mm films left behind following the laboratory’s closure. The materials were scanned at 8K resolution and took two years to edit. The work will be accompanied by a live score from Lawrence English, the artist behind the second performance.

English’s own offering as part of the double bill, The Rest is my Ghost, takes audiences into the realm of experimental sound. Combining manipulated environmental recordings, electronically generated sounds, and amplified frequencies, the performance draws on the artist’s exploration of what he calls ‘acid nostalgia’ — referring to the tendency to romanticise the past while overlooking its less desirable realities. This is an idea that took shape after the artist’s encounter with AI-generated videos of the 1990s that recreated the look of the decade, while leaving out the realities of life as it was actually experienced. The exchange of creative roles continues in this work, with Makino contributing light-based visuals to English’s soundscape.

3. Contemplate life, loss, death and reanimation

 

Can something absent, lost or dead be made present again through representation?

This question lies at the heart of Corporeal Forms: Four Stories, a performance by Taiwanese writer, researcher and filmmaker Chen Wan-Yin and artist Hsu Che-Yu. The work is rooted in historical research, memory and the reconstruction of things that have disappeared, and brings together the two artists and master puppeteer Kuo Chien-Fu, incorporating traditional Taiwanese glove puppetry as part of the performance.

The 45-minute performance opens with a puppeteer manipulating a dead sparrow, making it appear to come alive and fly again. The work takes audiences through four episodes of seemingly unrelated and unusual histories: a rabbit killed in connection with a swine fever vaccine, ancestral photographs taken against reused painted studio backdrops, attempts to restore a population of wild horses through breeding, and the separation of conjoined twins which was broadcast live on television in 1979. The attempt to recreate or recover the physical presence of something lost is the element that connects these stories.

4.  Find a Singapore connection as film interweaves with dance

 

Rounding out the selection is a Singapore offering, On Memories of Countless Days Away (2026), an experimental feature film by filmmaker-artists Elysa Wendi and Liao Jiekai that brings together documentary, memory and dance. This is a work that has been several years in the making, having received support from SGIFF’s film fund in 2022. Its world premiere at this year’s festival brings it back to the very organisation that helped it take shape.

The 102-minute film follows two longtime friends as they revisit their childhoods in Singapore and their early development as artists. Drawing on footage accumulated over the years, they reflect on their personal histories and reconstruct a dance for which no recording survives. Moving between Singapore and Japan, the film touches on questions of belonging, ancestry and citizenship through their personal and family histories.

Both artists are closely involved with Cinemovement, a platform that encourages collaborations between filmmakers, dancers and visual artists. Their interest in bringing these disciplines together provides a fitting background to a film in which dance becomes another way of revisiting the past.

If you’re more used to encountering moving-image art in a museum or art gallery, Undercurrent offers a good opportunity to bring your curiosity to a film festival. With artists working across sound, performance, puppetry and dance, there’s plenty here to interest film buffs as well as the visual art crowd.

For those curious, SGIFF runs from 21 October 2026 to 1 November 2026. Get your tickets to Undercurrent here .

All images courtesy of SGIFF