Amidst transcribing my conversation with Daniel Hui during the 68th BFI London Film Festival, news broke of his latest film Small Hours of the Night (2024) being banned in Singapore. While such news risks becoming an overrepresented angle, due to its trending potential, the film’s artistic integrity and refined aesthetic linger post-festival, inevitably shifting the focus back to the film itself.
Its themes, style, and the context in which it was created have helped it establish meaningful connections with a wide range of international audiences, internationally. The work speaks for itself.
Having garnered international acclaim for his previous work, including the award-winning Eclipses (2011), Snakeskin (2014) and Demons (2018), Daniel Hui’s style and experimental approach to the documentary genre has introduced his nuanced cinematic world to global audiences. His fourth film, Small Hours of the Night (2024), expands upon themes explored in his earlier works while also establishing a unique cinematic expression that has been met with both critical praise and enthusiastic responses.
Revisiting our conversation, I remain excited and honoured to have had the opportunity for such a creative and meaningful exchange, offering a rare glimpse into Hui’s artistic vision and approach. The conversation itself, free-flowing, rhizomatic at its core expands into many different directions, revealing the care, attention and artistic integrity that shaped the film. It also addresses all the “how”, “why” and “when” relating to the film’s themes, aesthetics and timeless historico-political context. As Hui tells me, the film invites viewers to reflect on a shared political moment in time, serving as a catalyst for contemplation of space, location, and time. Historical events, presented experimentally through closed-form and chiaroscuro lighting, become timeless reflections of our shared human experience, linking to the tragic themes of Sophocles’ Antigone, among other works.
"I think that we are approaching this non-place..... I don’t think it is an accident that we are all living in politically oppressive regimes all over the world and there is currently hardly a place in the world where people have freedom of speech. I think it is all connected to this homogenisation".
E.N. First of all, congratulations for last night’s premiere at the BFI London International Film Festival. How did you find it? If I am not mistaken, the film has already been shown in many different countries, and you may have presumably noticed different connections that the audience potentially made with it. Are there any examples that come to mind, perhaps? Any differences or similarities compared to last night?
D.H.: I feel that what is being shown in the film unfortunately is becoming more and more relevant to what is currently happening in the world. We are in a time when we are all facing increasingly more and more censorship and political oppression, based on our political views. The issue with Gaza is one of the biggest ones right now, but of course it goes even beyond Gaza. So, I feel that in a way it’s kind of interesting for me to see that. I think when I made my previous films, I was talking about Singapore but now it almost feels to me, without meaning to sound egotistical, like the world is becoming like Singapore. Censorship has somehow become the norm in our lives, and we have to be careful about who we express our opinions to and how our opinions are expressed. So, it makes me feel very sad that this is happening all over the world. And I think that when I show the film this is the first thing that audiences respond to. As you know, there were three films before this one. When I made my film Snakeskin (2014), I think people were more curious about the political situation in Singapore. There were a lot of questions about how oppressive the regime is in Singapore and things like that. But now, it is not even about Singapore anymore. People ask questions about what is happening in their own countries. How oppressive the regimes in their countries are. I feel that we are sharing a moment everywhere in the world, where we have to stand up against political tyranny and censorship.
E.N.: I was wondering about this specific political moment in time you mention and how this film perhaps resonates with people across countries, from different intellectual backgrounds or political affiliations. It seems that we somehow share an experience with many common characteristics.
D.H.: This makes it very clear to me and to all of us that our humanity is a shared one- we have a shared humanity, a shared responsibility to resist this moment in time. Sorry, I may sound like an activist, but I am not an activist (laughs!).
E.N: (laughs). Yes! I think this element of something in common, is expressed through the film. What was really striking about it, in my opinion, is the closed form that you use. It makes time and place collapse almost into a point that can be anywhere in the world, anytime. So, it serves well as a premise that can apply to many different contexts, people, ideas, circumstances.
D.H.: I feel that we are seeing a real homogenisation in the sense of politics, but also in spaces in general. I was in Korea, about two weeks ago, in this small city called Goyang and it looked to me like that it could be anywhere in the world. The buildings looked like they could be in China, Singapore, or any American city. Everything looks completely the same and the only difference is the people, you know. I think that we are approaching this non-place; as people in power are approaching our lives in a way that is stripped of all defining details, and even architects are designing buildings to look as generic as possible. And this is the reason why I wanted to shoot the film in this empty room. Because an empty room is like a non-place. What makes a place is all the memories, our different histories and emotions that we put into it. And in a way this is also to resist this homogenisation of politics and culture that we see right now. I don’t think it is an accident that we are all living in politically oppressive regimes all over the world and there is currently hardly a place in the world where people have freedom of speech. I think it is all connected to this homogenisation.
"We discovered this wonderful spectrum of grey and the degradations of the light, which were like a third character in the film alongside the sound, that acts as the fourth character".
E.N.: I think the title of the film is very interesting because during the Small Hours of the Night, as I write in the review, we can have this idea of an enclosure that can be very oppressive but at the same time serve as the dawn of the new day. Something different can happen. I think there is a particular scene in the film where we see Vicki stand up, go to the desk where the tape recorder is and take the tape out. This perhaps gives spectators the idea and the hope that maybe if we trace things back, there is a possibility of a reversal? Or allowing things to develop in a way that they cannot be harmful, at least.
D.H.: Right, yeah! I think you articulated exactly what I wanted to do both with this film and the last film Snakeskin (2014) which is also about history. I think that both films are in a way about time travel, as a metaphor of course, but also in a more literal sense as each time we learn about history we can also reimagine history. And when we reimagine our past, we imagine our future and our present. So, the idea you just mentioned was very important to me. In this film Vicki is like a spider; kind of a spider and that’s why the spiders in the film are quite important. Vicki’s character is taking threads from the 1980s, or the 1970s, from the present day and weaves them into a kind of a web, a web that has its own universe. And I think that that’s something that we all do. So, someone who was involved in the tombstone trial, Tan Chu Boon, becomes important in a way. He is very distant, as Singapore is a very distant country for you, but even in Singapore he is a forgotten character. It is an anecdote that is not even mentioned these days, it was just a small incident that happened in the 1980s. But these small incidents form the fabric of our memory and actually form a relation to us that help us to recalibrate and reimagine our relationship with the past and present. So, they become very important characters, and this is why the word “small” in the film, was referring to those so-called small people, those minor characters. The film is about the minor characters and how they can actually be as important as the major characters in history. Also, just to mention that Small Hours of the Night is the English translation of a collection of poems by the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, who also a communist guerilla, fighting in the jungle. He was later executed by his own group as they thought that he was a CIA spy. They killed him and later they realised that he wasn’t a spy. But he wrote these beautiful poems that were very personal. Not so much about politics but about life and emotions. They are so beautiful in a way that the film is really inspired by his work and life.
E.N.: That’s beautiful! It certainly comes through in the film. I think what’s also striking is the fact that you manage to combine all these different testimonies. It seems as if Vicki, for example, while interacting directly with the interrogator is impersonating different people. Their interaction feels as if we see two main characters that are made of fragments of all those smaller or minor characters that you have just mentioned. So, we see two characters in Vicki and the interrogator, who are constructed and deconstructed at the same time with fragments from smaller characters. I am not sure if this is just how I saw and experienced the film, your intention, or something that happened organically on set?
D.H: It definitely is one of my first considerations regarding Vicki- I won’t actually use the word impersonation, but I actually think that she is possessed in a spiritual sense. She is possessed by these ghosts, some of whom are alive. But she is possessed by the past. She is possessed by history. I think one of the main things in my filmmaking is this idea that we are not one person, but multiple people. And we are made up from all the histories of all these other people some of whom we don’t even know yet. Through cinema we can get in touch with the multiplicity inside of us. So, in a way I was envisioning Vicki as a proxy for the audience to enter this world, so for the audience to embody the different subjective “I”s in history. On a personal level, one of the saddest realisations for me is that I only have one past and one history. But then through cinema I realised that I can actually have multiple pasts and multiple histories and that the boundaries around the definition of “I”, are not so rigid, hard, but they are actually very porous. The boundaries between me and you and the way we are talking about now, for example. In some ways I am taking some of your personality and opinions and I am sure, so are you. That’s how people relate to each other and are listening to each other. So, in a way I always wanted to imagine how we relate to history in that sense but how the boundaries between us and others in history are porous, as well. Because their lives have a very present effect on our lives right now. Even if we don’t know them or how yet. This also informs the aesthetic strategy of the film where the protagonists don’t share the same frame until the very end. So, the whole film is in the form of shot and reverse shot, in a way. We embody the position of the person who is not on the screen, and how we are able to project what we imagine onto that person that we see on the screen.
"I wanted to focus the attention away from things that are obvious or immediate to us, to things that we don’t usually sense, or we don’t usually pay attention to".
E.N.: I think the closed form in the film and the fact that we had one person each time certainly allowed this to come through. Also, I would like to expand a bit on the aesthetics of the film because, in my opinion, there is a sense of poetry emanating through the way in which you framed it, but also in the use of light. It looked to me as if the faces were illuminated from within in a way and there was a sense of tactility; they looked like sculptures, almost. Not in a static way of course, but in a way in which we anticipate movement. So, I was wondering about your choices in relation to the cinematography.
D.H.: The black and white choice came from this consideration of the question of the binary. You know, male and female, black and white, exterior and interior. But in a way that makes this binary so clear and focused, I wanted to transgress the binary. It’s a bit paradoxical but that’s how I was thinking of the light. The light that transgresses, you know. In a way I wanted to reduce my filmmaking too so that I can maybe see differently or see more. So, I set it in a room that people assume is a non-place. To be honest when I was writing it, it was very difficult because there weren’t a lot of things to shoot inside the room. But when I saw this film The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) by Jack Arnold, the sci-fi film from the 1950s, I got a huge inspiration from the ending of the film. Because I then realised that instead of seeing it as a difficulty or as a limitation it frees me to see other things that I wouldn’t usually notice -the small creatures in a room, the cracks on the wall. These are little things that we don’t usually notice, when there are other big things such as action or whatever.
In terms of the choice to shoot on black and white, we also discovered this wonderful spectrum of grey and the degradations of the light which were like a third character in the film alongside the sound, that acts as the fourth character. In a place like Singapore that is very urban, and the architecture is all very new and modern, we focus on the big monolithic buildings and things. It is not very inspiring because it looks like it could be anywhere in the world. And I guess that this is why I wanted to focus the attention away from things that are obvious or immediate to us, to things that we don’t usually sense, or we don’t usually pay attention to. Politically as well, when we think about history we think about the great men, right -all great men are historicised. So, I wanted to draw the attention to all the people who are not historicised or are not included. This film, as well as the previous one that is called Snakeskin (2014) deal with the so-called minor characters or the forgotten characters, the erased characters in history. It is also to shift our attention away from how history is built equally from these small characters like you and me.
E.N.: On that note, I was wondering about the process of selecting the elements or features that connect the film to historical facts. I think that some parts of the dialogue come from verbatim testimonies. What process did you follow in terms of selecting those? Did you have to go through a large volume of testimonies in order to select the ones that informed the film’s dialogue in the end?
D.H.: I came across this anecdote of the tombstone trial when I was making Snakeskin (2014), which was set in the 1950s and 1960s. This newer film was set in the 1970s and 1980s, so I thought that it wouldn’t fit within the timeline. I wanted to make a film about this during the last 10 years or so now. I guess it was interesting to me because this case, which is completely forgotten now, dominated the headlines for nearly two days in Singapore. It stayed very briefly in the public imagination. I found it absurd that a man could be put through a trial and put into prison for something that he wrote on a tombstone. In a way it is the story of Antigone, by Sophocles. You are not even allowed to mourn the dead because mourning can be, and is, an act of resistance against the powers that want to control a memory. So, I was quite interested in the absurdity of this case. And then I decided to also include the other case, which is the case of the woman murderer. It was one of the most sensational cases in Singapore in the 1980s and in this sense, it still exists in the public imagination. The woman in this case is not often talked about because it is a murder case, and it is the man who is the point of focus. So, I wanted to contrast these two cases. Also, the linking thread between them is the defence lawyer who, as you have seen in the film, was the first opposition politician in Singapore to win a seat against the government in the elections. That person is also right now in danger of being forgotten because he was active briefly in the 1970s and mostly in the 1980s and 1990s. Today he is not often talked about anymore, even though he was a very important figure in our political history. So, this was the rationale behind this. I guess to prevent forgetting, in a way. To build a monument for people who are forgotten.
"For me that is the role of cinema – to be able to not preserve, because preservation sounds like something is dead- but to keep alive a certain memory... everyday acts of resistance that we wouldn’t normally notice".
E.N.: That’s beautiful. It brings me to something that permeates the film in the sense of an interplay between past, present and future in terms of small people and identities like you mentioned earlier; who we are and the subjectivity that is not bounded in a way. The fact that we all connect to one another. How can these associations also connect to time and space in a way, through acts of political dissidence. As something not necessarily tied to one place, but as something that transcends time and place. You mentioned earlier the story of Antigone and mourning being essentially a political act. We see the same thing being repeated in a completely different place, such as Singapore, at a completely different time, albeit having equal significance. So, I guess my question is if you see any parallels in terms of reference points that connect to expressions of disagreement, a dissensus in a way that you chose to focus on?
D.H.: I think that the only reason why we have the story of Antigone is because somebody wrote it, Sophocles, and it survived. For me that is the role of cinema – to be able to not preserve, because preservation sounds like something is dead- but to keep alive a certain memory. I was also thinking of the films of Theo Angelopoulos, because his films memorise parts of history that are not much talked about these days. The small acts of resistance, with regular people and I feel a big connection to that. Especially his film The Travelling Players (1975), which is a masterpiece of course. But yes, how cinema can actually keep alive this memory of everyday acts of resistance that we wouldn’t normally notice, or they wouldn’t usually be written down. In a way that is the continuation of Sophocles.
E.N.: Talking about the potential of cinema to visualise those things, I was really impressed by the way you expand and play with the form of cinema and also the boundaries of genres as well. Interestingly, your film is described as a documentary, but my personal experience of watching it wasn’t reflecting that. I caught myself wondering if that was a documentary, as it felt more like an experimental piece of work. So, I was wondering if you see any boundaries among forms and genres at all?
D.H.: I think just like we were talking about identities earlier, things like genre and boundaries are human created constructs, to help us better understand our reality. But these constructs are there to also liberate us in a way from thinking in terms of fixed structures. I am not really against these boundaries, but I see them as something that we can transgress. This film actually started as a straightforward documentary. In my mind it was going to be like a talking heads type of interview film. But I think for a long time I was not very comfortable with that, because I am not comfortable with seeing history as something completely dusted and settled. In fact, I think that this is extremely dangerous. That’s when people instrumentalise history into their own hands. So, I feel that history is something that we constantly need to interrogate and reimagine and re-write. Not to ignore facts, of course but to re-interpret these facts into how they make sense to us today. So, I guess my entry point to this history is through fiction, through the character of Vicki who is a proxy, first and foremost for me and hopefully also for the audience. By having her embodying history through a very personal lens, I wanted to subjectivise history. To make history individual and subjective and to make it closer to how we experience history in modern day. How we can avoid the dangers of fossilised history. Does that make sense?
E.N.: Absolutely! While watching your film, I had a strong sense of the past, present and future and how we can potentially see the past as not something rigid. I think what was striking for me is how cinematic time happens in the film. I couldn’t help but feel a sense of time being expansive; fragments of the present influencing perhaps how we approach the past, but also identify a potential future in a way that is expansive and specific, but equally, as you just mentioned, open to subjectivation by means of inviting the spectator to participate in that process.
D.H.: Yes, I was interested in how we experience time subjectively. Because, you know, I think that clock time is a colonial capitalist construct. How we experience time is not clock time. A single moment can feel like an eternity. And also, eternity can feel like it can happen in an instant. That’s why in the film time expands and contracts. I included a scene where the character is sleeping for five minutes. Of course I couldn’t hold it for much longer, but still five minutes in a film is quite tough (laughs). For me when I watch that scene it doesn’t feel like five minutes. It feels much shorter although some scenes in the film that are much shorter, feel a lot longer. I feel that’s my experience of cinema. I am very much interested in how my experience of time differs from clock time. I am constantly checking my phone in films because I want to check the disparity between clock time and subjective time, and that really fascinates me. It’s almost like a cliché; people have been comparing cinema to dreams from the very beginning, but it’s how we experience time both in dreams and in real life as well. As a filmmaker I am always interested in how we can shape time for us and for people. And I think that in itself is a political act, in a way.
"The way that we think about history today is not the same compared to the way in which pre-capitalist societies think about history and time"
E.N.: And I think it is also interesting to see how cinematic time might be considered differently, in connection to linear time. There has been some interesting academic research recently coming regarding cinematic time conceptualised in a non-western context, in relation to Buddhism (Fan, 2020; Chen, 2022) for example.
D.H. In a way past, present and future interconnect. I have been reading the work of Henri Bergson and I have been very inspired about the way in which he talks about time; time and the ways in which past, present and future interpenetrate each other. The reason why we think about time in a very blocked way is because we have thought about time spatially, instead of thinking about it temporally, which is qualitative and not quantitative. Because I believe that this is how we experience time in our daily lives outside the capitalist structure. Because the capitalist structure requires us to compartmentalise time, which I think is to the detriment of history. Because the way that we think about history today is not the same compared to the way in which pre-capitalist societies think about history and time. To think about how we experience time and to think about how we experience history is to actually remake or relearn how to live in a society and to live with each other. It sounds a bit abstract, but I think in a very concrete way, you know, it took a month and a half to shoot this film, although the film takes place in real time and within this month and a half of shooting, we created a system of shooting with the cast and crew where we came in every day and we had a check-in; we always checked in with everybody to see how they were feeling. If something was not working, we would not continue shooting. So, in a way we had the luxury of not having capitalist time control our social relations. And I think that this created this very close sense of belonging within each one of us. There was a responsibility of care and not a responsibility of getting the job done in time, as in within schedule. So, if we reimagine the way we experience time and the way we relate to time, we can actually configure our social relations in a very real and practical way that is not abstract.
E.N: I understand what you mean. But I think that elevates it to something beyond what one likes or dislikes, perhaps. Something that goes beyond an appreciation of the form, or aesthetic approach, to express how we can potentially configure a notion of the ideal…. I found myself coming back to your film again and again. I had those scenes in my mind, and I was trying to identify what is it that keeps me, and potentially other spectators, coming back to particular scenes. I was trying to analyse it from a film reviewer’s perspective, but also in connection to my own work and research; the notion of affect, Deleuze and so on, and I came to the realisation that what is at work is essentially time, and specifically the ways in which it works outside the film and within me, now. So, from multiple perspectives, these choices point to a great piece of cinematic work.
D.H.: Thank you! You are probably the first one to articulate what I was trying to do with time, in a very similar way to what I was thinking. You talked about the ideal and maybe, I am not sure if you share this idea, but I am not sure about the idea of the ideal or utopia anymore. Because I think that thinking of a utopia that is always postponed into the future is in a way the same thing as thinking of the past as something that is completely rigid. Because the utopia is right now. We have to create our utopias in every single moment, in each social relation. Me and you right now are creating our own ideal utopia already. It’s happening at the moment, you know. Recently, I have become interested in the growth of underground spaces in Singapore, which is quite surprising for me considering how rigid the regime still is. Not just the rave spaces, but also like community spaces, where people come together for a moment to talk about certain issues, communicate about things, to have fun, you know. And that ideal community exists just for a moment and then it disappears again. I talked to a lot of people about this, and some people think that you know we need an institution to prolong this or make it stand outside of time. But I actually believe that the beauty of these movements is that they exist in time. And it is temporary and then it disappears. And this is why it cannot be controlled. I think that’s the most important thing. Because of this all the powers that try to control and codify everything, cannot have a grasp on those movements. And to have these movements, like you and me right now, we are essentially reconfiguring our own way of what a social relationship can be like. What our ideal should be. And for it to exist in this moment it means that it can also be repeated in many different moments and in many different spaces, in any place, anytime, whatever (laughs). Any-space-whatever, like Deleuze writes (laughs).
E.N.: (laughs)
D.H.: It is beautiful to witness what is happening in Singapore right now. And to be able to share this moment with you outside or Singapore, is meaningful.
E.N.: That is wonderful! Thank you so much. And this brings me to the final question I had. There seems to be a vibrant film scene at the moment in Singapore, with some interesting work being produced. And I think I read somewhere that you are part of a collective?
D.H.: Maybe I am not the best person to comment on this, as I have an insider’s view on what’s happening. We started this collective 15 years ago, because we were starting to make films and didn’t have access to filmmaking resources, so what we did was to help each other. And the only reason I am here today is because we had this wish to help each other. And make films outside the so-called system. I think in a way what we do extends beyond the film itself, because every time we convene like a crew to shoot, or you know, like me and you here, we can create our own way of being with each other.
E.N.: Thank you so much for your time, the meaningful exchange and your wonderful film! Do you have any plans, or working on any ideas about your next film, perhaps?
D.H.: Yes! I want to make a happy film! (laughs). All of my films so far have been sad and depressing. They served as a way for me to express certain feelings of anguish and pain. But I would like my next film to be about a utopia that is happening right now. Not in an escapist way to forget the pain of course, but to draw from the times of darkness that we are living through right now and to create happiness, which I feel is something that is very difficult for us to see right now. But I feel that is very necessary, because that’s the only way we can change things. So, it’s going to be a romantic film with a lot of movement and colour (laughs!). So, kind of the opposite of this film.
E.N.: (laughs!) That sounds lovely! Thank you for sharing this with me. I look forward to watching that.