Singapore

Singapore is the smallest screen industry on this site and the one that punches furthest above its size, mostly because it has had to. This page is the index to what is here: 6 dramas, 4 films, 15 people and 3 guides, each one a record with sourced fields rather than a paragraph of opinion, and all of it linked so a title leads to a face and a face leads back to everything else that person made.

The television and the cinema here answer to different pressures, and that is the useful thing to know first. Broadcast drama ran for decades through one organisation, Mediacorp and its predecessors, split across Channel 8 in Mandarin and Channel 5 in English. That produced a canon a whole country watched at once: The Little Nyonya averaged 993,000 viewers an episode, Holland V swept every major acting award in one night, and Under One Roof put a family sitcom in a Housing Board flat and exported it to Australia.

The films went the other way. Singapore makes very few of them and a surprising number end up at festivals. Ilo Ilo took the Camera d'Or at Cannes, the first Singaporean feature to win anything there. A Land Imagined won the Golden Leopard at Locarno. 881 and I Not Stupid did their damage at home instead, one about the getai singers of the Hungry Ghost Festival and the other about the school streaming system, and both of them were about something the country was arguing with itself over.

Language is worth flagging. A Singaporean production may be in Mandarin, English, Hokkien, Malay or several at once, sometimes in the same scene. Ilo Ilo runs through four. This is not a subtitling error.

Where to watch is the question this site answers the same way every time. Every title page carries a "Where to watch" block naming the platforms licensed in your region, whether that is a streaming service or a theatrical release with no stream at all. We do not host anything and we do not link to unlicensed copies. If a title has no licensed platform where you are, the page says so rather than sending you looking.

Cast is where the archive earns its name. An actor is entered once, on the cast list of the title they appeared in, and their profile builds its own filmography by reading that relationship backwards. Open The Little Nyonya, click Qi Yuwu, and 881 is there too; open Ilo Ilo, click Yeo Yann Yann, and so is she. In an industry this size the same faces recur, and the archive shows that rather than describing it.

Food sits alongside the screen records rather than beneath them. Chicken rice is judged on its rice, laksa is two different soups wearing one name, and the hawker centre that serves both was added to UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2020. The guides here are written to the same standard as the records: sourced, and silent wherever nobody can source it.