From Michigan to Singapore, a meditation on dreams built on sand

A sprawling tale of two Singapores, the short documentary Sandcastles draws connections between Singapore, Michigan – a 19th-century ghost town swallowed by sand following widespread deforestation – and the island country of Singapore, where rapid development and land reclamation has, for decades, been enabled by the importation of sand. More poetic exploration than call to action, the work surveys waterways, cycles of development and the transient nature of sand – deceptively sturdy over short timescales but, over decades, quite volatile. The Singaporean New York-based director Carin Leong’s film moves between stunning overhead shots that capture the scale of the nation of Singapore’s project, and intimate interviews with stakeholders in the two distant and, in most ways, quite disparate places. Through this construction, the sand dune becomes both an example of and a metaphor for humanity’s precarious relationship with the natural world.