Experiencing Interruptions?

The Spaces Between Us

In a video survey of a multitude of existences in Singapore, The Spaces Between Us stumbles into an attempt of society that reckons with the effect of the pandemic. In the polarising effect of the pandemic, the disruption of everyday routines has differing outcomes for the privileged and the marginalised. For a nation whose pandemic population consists of 90% of foreign workers; The Spaces Between Us uncovers two distinct populations of Singaporeans and otherwise that are working apart, but in tandem to understand Singapore in the new normal.

  • Adar Ng
    Director
  • Dave Lim
    Director
  • Project Type:
    Documentary
  • Runtime:
    19 minutes 30 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    June 30, 2023
  • Production Budget:
    11,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Singapore
  • Country of Filming:
    Singapore
  • Aspect Ratio:
    2.39:1
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
  • National Museum of Singapore- Picturing the Pandemic
    Singapore
    Singapore
    October 1, 2021
    World Premiere
  • Dali International Photography Festival
    Da Li
    China
    November 1, 2023
    Asia Premiere
  • Hong Kong International Photography Festival
    Hong Kong
    Hong Kong
    December 1, 2023
    Hong Kong Premiere
  • Busan Int'l Video Art Festival
    Busan
    Korea, Republic of
    September 15, 2025
    Korean Premiere
    Official Selection
Director Biography - Adar Ng, Dave Lim

Adar Ng and Dave Lim are an artist duo that we have worked together since 2018 through multiple artistic, curatorial and research projects. Their notable projects include The Spaces Between Us (2021) and ON/OFF/SCREEN 2021, a moving image exhibition. Collectively, their work has travelled internationally in film festivals and exhibitions such as Cannes Film Festival, Singapore International Film Festival and Athens Digital Arts Festival. Their artistic concerns circle around the quotidian visual poetry of life, the need to bear witness and an instatiable questioning of social paradigms.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

The Spaces Between Us is an accidental film.

It is an overly engineered documentary. It attempts to slice up society into neat piles of bureaucratic understanding; ranging from age, ethnicity, religion, socio-economic standings. In this clumsiness of profiling and segmentation, the vicariousness of real life embellishes itself with the smallest of actions, actions of hope, actions of resistance and actions of longing. These expressions serendipitously mirror the attempt at controlling the virus in Singapore, as bureaucrats move around to define the war on COVID.

We are now, after many years of dependence on migrant labour, having to label workers down with COVID-19 as ‘non-community cases’. As of 01 November 2020, at least 50000 of 58019 cases has been a foreign worker in a dormitory.

For a good month or two, all news of COVID-19 felt unreal, as we hear of ravaging cases in dormitories just a mere kilometer or two away from the government housing units that we reside in. Ironically, these units are built by the very people whose lives and bodies are ravaged by the virus.

But, we’ve been brought up to know that Singapore is a small nation. How much plurality could possibly co-exist?

The Spaces Between Us attempts to reconcile this physical disjoint; the disjoint being the multitude of existences, livelihoods and being. It is to that degree that the film offers a mere glimpse of an even smaller section of time in Singapore’s history.

Hopefully in embellishing these different existences, the audience reckons with the discomfort as Singapore surges onto dizzying new economic heights, dreams, aspirations amidst a ravaging pandemic locally and globally.