The Impossibility of Knowing
The film, made up of static shots, films locations where crimes or accidents have taken place, long after the events have happened, to find out if these places can transcend time to engender their own significance. With the barest of details gleaned from contemporaneous news clippings, Pin Pin reconstructs the incidents via a dry voiceover narrated by Lim Kay Tong, who is the presenter for local crime re-construction series Crime Watch. The locales are marked with an address.
The Impossibility of Knowing was commissioned by the DMZ International Documentary Festival in 2009. It world premiered at the 2nd DMZ IDF on 11 Sep 2010. It had its Singapore premiere at the Singapore Biennale 2011, the Q&A moderated by curator Matthew Ngui.
2010, documentary, 11 mins 31 secs, 16:9, colour, shot on HD 1920 x 1080 25P, in English, no subtitles
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The Impossibility of Knowing came into being because I was wondering if the video camera can capture the aura of a space that has experienced trauma. I made a list of places I knew about where accidents had happened and we filmed them. But my camera did not “capture” anything. It could be due to the limitations of physics, but the canal remained a canal, the house, a house. Maybe the aura we sought doesn’t exist or we just did not have the requisite gift to see the aura. Maybe you can see better than us.
At my studio along Serangoon Road, Singapore, I often walk past a hotel called Fortuna Hotel. It is a nondescript hotel with 60 rooms, catering mainly to Indian tourists.
I happen to be old enough to know that this hotel is built on the same site where Hotel New World once was. The hotel collapsed in 1986 because of a gross engineering miscalculation. On that spot, 33 people died and many others were injured.
Walking past this building, you would hardly know that this happened. I wonder how many other people like me walk past that space and think about that tragedy.
It occurred to me that I held something within: a subjective list of places that I cannot forget because of the tragedies, incidents, and accidents that identify them. Each of us harbours an inchoate list in our minds.
For this documentary, I visit these spaces in my list. There are many locations in it you may not have heard about as they did not make the headlines. Most are ordinary spaces: a corridor, a neighbourhood mosque, a canal. Looking at them, you would not have known what had happened. There are no marks or commemorative plaques.
Despite Singapore’s hyper-urban and sterile appearance, this terrain is still wrought over with human emotions. A place may just be a place to some, but be fraught with meaning for others. It is the subjectivity of emotional nodes connected to geography that fascinates me.
The title The Impossibility of Knowing refers to the limits of images, the limits of what we see and can know, from what we see. It also refers to the act of construction of meaning by the director. The process is tenuous and highly mediated. You never know the truth as it was.
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A DMZ Docs Commission
with support from SFC Short Film GrantNarrator: Lim Kay Tong
Producer & Director: Tan Pin Pin
Associate Producer: Josephine Seetoh
Cinematographer David Shiyang Liu
Editor: Grace Xiao
Sound Design & Audio: Jerry Teo, SoundRooom
Transcription: Asra Aman -
2025 Polytechnic University of the Philippines, Marg1n Launch
2024 Qiantai, China
2023 NUS Museum, Off Script Series
2023 Videoex, Switzerland “Spirit of Place”
2023 Liberation Docfest, Bangladesh (Retrospective)
2020 Taiwan International Documentary Festival, “Space and Place”
2020 Metakino, Finland
2020 Asian Film Archive, States of Motion
2019 Iowa City Documentary Festival
2019 Dok Leipzig (Retrospective)
2017 Montreal IDF (Retrospective)
2016 LUX, UK “Like slow breathing, it seemed to emanate from inside the walls”
2015 Singapore FF, 50th Anniversary, Malaysia
2015 La Cinémathèque française, Singapour mon Amour, Homage to Tan Pin Pin
2011 Flaherty Seminar, USA (Showcase)
2011 Visions du Reel, In Competition
2011 Oberhausen Short Film Festival, In Competition
2011 Singapore Shorts
2011 Singapore Biennale
2010 DMZ Docs (World Premiere)