Sandcastles
2025 · 17m
Directed by Carin Leong
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
As Singapore imports sand for urban expansion, a ghost town bearing its name lies buried underneath sand on the other side of the world. Sandcastles parallels two Singapores: one in Michigan where mass deforestation in the 1800s stirred surrounding sand dunes to swallow it whole, while its namesake in the East emerged from sand by reclaiming what was once only marshland and water.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A structurally clever inversion that almost works—two ghost Singapores, one swallowed by sand, one born from it—but Leong plays it too tastefully, too mythic; she's made a formally interesting essay when she could've made something genuinely disorienting.
Leong situates the essay film in a lineage of geographic elegy and structural doubling (Marker, Akerman's spatial meditations) while maintaining formal rigor in how she lets the parallel archive—deforestation records, reclamation maps, sand itself—become the argument rather than illustration of it.
The decision to let sand dunes and urban development footage speak in exact visual parallel rather than through voiceover creates an almost tactile equivalence between erasure and emergence that a smaller budget might've lost; Leong trusts the cut to do the conceptual work.