Won't Someone Claim Us?

At the recently concluded 2014 Singapore International Film Festival, questions of identity in an increasingly globalized, confusing world were foremost on the minds of young Asian filmmakers. Perhaps no other group is as well-placed to conduct such an inquiry, since few have ever experienced displacement on the scale that this group has, counting within its ranks legal and illegal immigrants, refugees, victims of ethnic cleansing, wars, economic deprivation --you name it.The impact of modern globalization is tackled head on in Thai-American director Rooth Tang’s Sway, where the action flits between continents and airports, the narrative fragmented like the lives of the characters themselves. Tang suggests that the rootless individual must snatch his solace from whomever he can, whenever he can—geographies are beside the point.Dealing with a less glamorous sort of displacement is Malaysian-Chinese director Ming Jin Woo’s The Second Life of Thieves, which tells the story of a group of Chinese immigrants to Malaysia. Woo takes note of how the cultural impoverishment of the immigrant limits the life choices available to him.In The Night is Still Young Sri Lankan director-in-exile Indika Udugampola asks whether there is more than one kind of exile. Some of us can be spiritually exiled even while living in our places of origin, while others are comfortable no matter where they are—like turtles, they carry their spiritual home with them everywhere like a protective carapace.In In the Absence of the Sun, Indonesian director Lucky Kuswandi looks at the opportunities we are afforded by globalization and the resulting effect on our relationship to home. Should we expect a person who has been given the freedom to spread her wings in the anonymity of a foreign land to suddenly clip those wings when she returns home? And if, while she was away, home has become a very different place, is it still home?In Chigasaki Story, Japanese director Takuya Misawa has a relatively privileged vantage point, but even wealthy Japan is not immune to the disruptive effects of globalization, as he shows. When negotiating human relations, how should a person strike a balance between a restless individualism and traditional expectations that prioritize social cohesion?Now on the festival circuit, these stories will travel from continent to continent, like the global souls they tell of—circling, circling, circling, on the baggage carousel, waiting to be claimed.* *To paraphrase Pico Iyer, the poet laureate of this tribe.