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Finding Joy
From Bedok to the Barbican – why I’ll never stop going to the movies
Nothing compares with the movie hall experience – and what comes after.
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The writer recalls her awe of first entering a theatre at The Projector, its greenish interiors and rows of slightly worn seats transporting her back to her childhood.
ST PHOTO: CHONG JUN LIANG
Jermaine Wong
In the 2003 Taiwanese art-house film Goodbye, Dragon Inn, the elderly actor Shih Chun sits in a dilapidated cinema theatre, watching his younger self on screen. He remarks: “No one goes to the movies any more, and no one remembers us any more.”
Oh, but I do, I do. Going to the movies was a formative part of my childhood. Growing up in Bedok, my family used to take me to the old Princess Theatre to watch Chinese wuxia films like Dragon Inn. It was the one genre that had something for everyone in my family – swordplay for my dad, chivalric ideals for my older sister, and a dash of romance for my mum.
