Mirror was inspired by the artist’s visit to Bukit Brown Cemetery, where exhumations of over 3,000 graves are taking place for the construction of a new highway, cleaving the old burial ground into two. This bifurcation is also visited upon the soldier, a recurring figure in Boo’s cinema: one serves the present-day Armed Forces; the other the Malayan Communist Party from the past. Both soldier-figures are lost in what appears to be the same space. As the dual realities echo and diverge from each other, this short film collapses temporal realities and narratives, reiterating the point that our present and future are inextricably tied to our past, while underscoring the critical distance one might need to view history.
