At 9pm on June 26 2022, the Cathay Cineplex at 2 Handy Road screened its last movie—Top Gun: Maverick—before shuttering its doors forever.1 Operator mm2 Asia, which has been running the network of Cathay Cineplex theatres since 2017, identified the closure as a “business decision”, explaining it as “part of the cost rationalization process for its cinema operations”
In 1961, a time when the world was scrambling to shiny new heights with towering skyscrapers and novel machinery, the young explorers of the Piedmont Speleological Group ventured into the rural Italian South, searching for undiscovered primeval depths. The abyss they eventually descended deep into turned out to be the third deepest cave in the world at the time.
Being both an NTU student and resident of Singapore’s east means I am no stranger to a protracted, time-sucking commute. I usually try to squeeze all the productive work possible out of my close to 2-hour journey back home—since entering university, I have become the seasoned practitioner of a precarious one-woman, posture-wrecking, laptop-on-knee balancing act.
A documentary film which charts the final days of the eponymous Bangkok theatre, Scala delves into the personal histories of the in-house workers and director Ananta Thitanat herself, who spent her childhood on the grounds as the daughter of a nearby theatre worker. The film’s languorous, persistent shots and steady angles demonstrate a preoccupation with encapsulating interactions between people and space as they unfold organically, observed through the lens of a distant camera.