"A sprawling tale of two Singapores, the short documentary Sandcastles draws connections between Singapore, Michigan - a 19th-century ghost town swallowed by sand following widespread deforestation - and the island country of Singapore, where rapid development and land reclamation has, for decades, been enabled by the importation of sand. More poetic exploration than call to action, the work surveys waterways, cycles of development and the transient nature of sand - deceptively sturdy over short timescales but, over decades, quite volatile."
"The Singaporean New York-based director Carin Leong's film moves between stunning overhead shots that capture the scale of the nation of Singapore's project, and intimate interviews with stakeholders in the two distant and, in most ways, quite disparate places. Through this construction, the sand dune becomes both an example of and a metaphor for humanity's precarious relationship with the natural world."
A short documentary connects a 19th-century Michigan ghost town swallowed by sand after widespread deforestation with Singapore's decades-long land reclamation driven by imported sand. The work juxtaposes expansive aerial footage with intimate interviews across both locales, tracing waterways, cycles of development, and sand's transient qualities. Sand appears deceptively sturdy on short timescales yet volatile over decades, shaping and erasing landscapes. The sand dune functions both as a concrete example of environmental change and as a broader metaphor for humanity's precarious relationship with the natural world.
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