Our Light

Our Light explores the fragility of elderly memory and structural queer erasure in Singapore. The narrative follows an older gay man in a sterile nursing home who is battling cognitive decline, desperately clinging to his final, fading link to a closeted romance before it evaporates forever.

In a Singapore nursing home in 2044, Arthur, 74, lives with dementia. As his memories begin to disappear, fragments of a long buried love surface through gestures his body still remembers: numbers traced onto bedsheets, a hand reaching into empty space, and a dried hibiscus flower he can no longer name.

In 1987, Arthur was seventeen when he fell in love. Their relationship existed quietly in stolen moments, finding brief spaces where they could simply be together in a society that gave them no legal or social recognition. But when his lover leaves the country, their goodbye becomes another queer story with no official record.

Told entirely in authentic Singaporean English, the film integrates Singlish narration as a core creative layer. By directing AI speech tools to deliver the dialogue in a natural Singapore accent, the medium itself serves as conceptual commentary. It uses emerging technologies to preserve and highlight localised linguistic and cultural identities that the international festival circuit routinely overlooks.

As Arthur's final connection to his youth fades, the boundary between memory and forgetting begins to dissolve. When the last physical trace of their love is discarded, Arthur is left unable to remember what he has lost.

Yet somewhere beyond memory, two young men are still dancing.

Some love stories leave no official record. This is one of them.