Oasis of Now
A FILM BY Chee Sum Chia
PRODUCTION GRANT - SPRING 2021
A woman and a small girl are playing a game at an old apartment area in Kuala Lumpur. They behave like strangers to each other, taking separate routes to sneakily meetup at the least occupied corridor. The woman is HANH (30s), an undocumented Vietnamese who has lived in Malaysia for many years. The girl (9) is her daughter, who has been living with a local family from another apartment block for the past few years. They only see each other once every few weeks in this corridor.
After the meetup, Hanh continues her routine in the same apartment area. She speaks local languages and is familiar with the surroundings, moves from one home to another depending on different ethnic groups of local people giving her housekeeping work to make her ends meet. Until an immigration raid occurs, forcing her to escape to an elderly local Malay stranger who offers her temporary refuge at his apartment. While waiting for the raid outside to end, the stranger playfully mistakes Hanh as his daughter who left home. Hanh plays along to keep him accompanied, but gradually experiences his apartment as if she is his daughter, until a moment comes when it feels like they are a family.
However, such impressions only last until her return to the apartments after the raid, she realises the people and places she once felt like family and home, have always been seeing her differently. Needing to belong somewhere that she can be herself, Hanh decides to leave with her increasingly stranger daughter.