My Endless Numbered Days Explores Urban Alienation in Singapore and Japan SGIFF

 Posted on September 27, 2024  |  6 minutes  |  1121 words  |  Martina Birk

Shaun Neo’s feature debut “My Endless Numbered Days,” a study of urban alienation, has its world premiere at the Singapore International Film Festival.

Neo’s directorial short debut “Happily Ever After” (2015) screened at the 26th SGIFF and was nominated for best screenplay at the National Youth Film Awards 2016. “My Endless Numbered Days” follows Mitsue who returns to Japan after the disillusionment of a work opportunity in Singapore. Resuming her past life, she treads between friendships with a former lover and a new co-worker, while finding her footing despite being constantly on the move. A sense of alienation follows her from city to city as the young urbanite looks for novelty and adventure, but struggles to find a place to call home.

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The cast includes Banzai Mitsue, Yanagi Elisa and Toritani Hiroyuki.

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“The choice of subject for my feature debut was immensely personal. The project started with my personal life as inspiration for what transpires in the final film. I was 28 years old when this film started its principal photography and I think I was mainly concerned about the lack of personal tangible success, relative to my counterparts in Singapore,” Neo told Variety. “It was a really strange situation because I left Singapore for Japan to make films and I did participate in a lot of independent (by standards on this side of the world) projects. It helped me develop myself and find myself as a filmmaker by distancing myself from commercial projects but that naturally meant just getting by in life financially.

“On top of that, I have parents who are unable to understand what I do for a living. It made me doubt and question myself if this is at all a viable way of living life, especially in Singapore. Just by being in Singapore, you would naturally be complicated into this whirlwind of prioritizing making money and tangible successes as defined by society. And so, this film was my internal discourse of what is important in our lives and how we move forward as young adults.”

Urban alienation is an increasing common phenomenon across the world and Neo is keenly aware of this.

“I think urban alienation exists because we are human, flawed and broken. It fascinates me because there is nothing we can do about it. Urban alienation is very much the feeling of loneliness even though we are not alone, right? The solution might seem to be having to try to fix how were are when we are when we are in the company of others, but the solution is probably deep within ourselves,” Neo said. “As Andrei Tarkovsky says in his famous video ‘A Message to Young People,’ ‘I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves.

“I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, and almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.”

“So I think the problem is when we do not know who we are and we allow others to come and define us on our behalf,” Neo added.

The film is produced by Nishida Miyuki and Tetsuhide Mitsumine. “The passion he [Neo] has for filmmaking is not only being a cinematographer that I was curious about him when I met at the first time. Furthermore, there was also a personal interest in his filmmaking technique of having no scripts but only some clues of the direction for actors,” Tetsuhide told Variety.

Tetsuhide is planning the film’s Asia release, including in Japan and is also working on co-production features with some Asian countries including China and Malaysia.

Neo, who is also a cinematographer, is attending Terre Di Cinema in Italy next year to experience shooting on 35mm film.

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