Tear Screen (A Separation)

The late founding father of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew, called it a “moment of anguish,” shedding tears at a televised press conference on August 9, 1965, when Singapore separated irrevocably from Malaysia. In Tear Screen (A Separation),(2015) Ho Rui An portrays those tears as a large white streak that cuts one side of the former prime minister’s face, a marker of the historical fissure that gave birth to the separate and sovereign nation of Singapore and rang the death knell for the dream of a Greater Malaya.