LIFE LESSONS | ASIAN CINEMA | SINGAPORE
‘A Year of No Significance’, Kelvin Tong, 2023
The art of losing relevance
At The Projector, Singapore’s leading art-film cinema, we went to see Kelvin Tong’s A Year of No Significance (2023), original title: 大风 — da feng chui, Great Winds Blow.
The Chinese title of the film refers to a Hokkien children’s game. There is a storm and one by one the game master calls out a category of participants affected by the wind. All those belonging to the category called, must get up from their chairs and find another seat. With one seat taken away at every round, one of the participants fails to find an open space and gets left out. Metaphorically, while the others were capable of coping with the blowing winds, she wasn’t, and she must now pay the price.
大風吹 — Great Winds Blow.
吹什麼 — Who gets blown away?
吹華校生 — Get blown away … [the Chinese educated]
One United People
The story is set in 1979, the year that Singapore’s founding father and then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) resolutely placed the future of Singapore in the hands of the English Language — and boldly decided to close “Nantah.” Nanyang University (南洋大学 — Nányáng Dàxué) had been Singapore’s signature Chinese university. It was considered one…
