16 May – 28 Jun 2026
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Weekend Screenings |  |
ArtScience Cinema, Level 4 |
Ticketed Admission
Three pairings trace life’s contours, where flesh holds memory. From Naomi Kawase to Agnès Varda, cinema listens to bodies in time - be it weathered hands, faces or tender silhouettes that sculpt and resist the anatomical ideal.
Contours of Being is a meditation on bodies shaped by time, care, memory, and the quiet persistence of everyday gestures.
As Singapore reaches super‑aged status with nearly one in four citizens projected to be 65 and above by 2030, questions of how bodies change, endure and are cared for are gaining renewed urgency. In dialogue with Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy, these pairing of films by Naomi Kawase, Margaret Tait, Kimi Takesue, Gladys Ng and Agnes Varda expand anatomy beyond the statistical and medical gaze and into a lived, embodied experience.
About Flesh and Bones: The Art Of Anatomy
Flesh and Bones traces anatomy as a shared language of art and science, where the body becomes medicine, cosmos, and a vessel for contemplating life, transformation, and afterlife. See here for more details.
Film Line-up
Each set of films will be screened consecutively as listed.
Agnès Varda
Total duration: 110 min
Programme rating: TBC
*Limited screenings in May*
Margaret Tait / Naomi Kawase
Total duration: 98min
Programme rating: NC16 (Some Nudity)
Margaret Tait
Naomi Kawase
Gladys Ng / Kimi Takesue
Total duration: 102 min
Programme rating: PG
Gladys Ng
Kimi Takesue
Ticketed admission
Films will be screened consecutively as listed.
Showtimes (16 May – 28 Jun)
16, 23 & 30 May (Sat): 2pm
27 May (Wed, PH): 2pm
7, 14, 21 & 28 Jun (Sun): 2pm
Total duration: 98min
Spanning different cultures and eras, Naomi Kawase and Margaret Tait explore aging as from the lens of richly lived, relational experiences distinct from biological fact.
In rural Nara, Japan, Kawase turns her wandering camera toward her elderly surrogate mother, observing an aging body as a quiet archive of memory, tenderness, and impermanence.
Four decades earlier in Orkney, Scotland, Margaret Tait presents a pioneering work of poetic and experimental cinema, finding lyricism and dignity in age, gesture, and stillness.
Together, these works reveal how intimate acts of looking across time, place, and filial bonds can form a shared cinematic language of aging.
4min | English
Preceding Kawase’s films, Portrait of Ga is a quiet, intimate film made by Scottish filmmaker Margaret Tait, a pioneering figure in poetic and experimental cinema.
The film observes Tait’s mother, known as “Ga,” in her everyday surroundings on the Orkney Islands. Through small gestures, glances, and moments of stillness, Tait creates an unsentimental yet deeply affectionate portrait that is often described as one of the earliest personal essay films.
Image courtesy of LUX Distribution
39min | Japanese with English subtitles
In the idyllic countryside of Nara, director Naomi Kawase observes her surrogate mother - Granny Uno.
Reminscent of Koreeda’s Still Walking mixed with pangs of Charlotte Well’s Aftersun, the camera traces outlines of a life on the verge of disappearance, where simple everyday gestures become a grainy time capsule of hidden treasures.
Simple yet elegant, Katatsumori – a colloquial term for ‘snail’ in Japanese – is an intimate glance at the proof and patterns of an aging body through the gaze of youth, and what an anatomy love, care, and memory looks like beyond the surfaces of the skin.
Previously Screened At
10min | Japanese with English subtitles
Naomi Kawase’s more experimental follow‑up to Katatsumori is composed through fragments, sound, and everyday rituals.
Observing her mother within cycles of dusk, burning, and routine labour, the film situates aging within an ecology of light, matter, and time.
Overlaid phone recordings and intimate gestures dissolve boundaries between human and environment, framing the aging body not in isolation but as something sustained by interdependence, seasonal rhythm, and quiet, ongoing transformation.
Image courtesy of Kumie Inc.
45min | Japanese with English subtitles
A quiet culmination of Kawase’s early films made around her mother, Chiri turns to photographs, empty spaces, light, and lingering traces as an anatomy of a life that has already moved on.
Meditative yet intimately mesmerising, Chiri recalls the drifting temporality of Apichatpong, with the quiet, restrained gaze of Chantal Akerman’s ethics of looking - one that holds space for loss without a need for explanation or closure.
Image courtesy of Kumie Inc.
Ticketed admission
Films will be screened consecutively as listed.
Showtimes (16 May – 28 Jun)
16, 23 & 30 May (Sat): 4.30pm
27 May (Wed, PH): 4.30pm
7, 14, 21 & 28 Jun (Sun): 4.30pm
Total duration: 102min
Drawing from the embodied experience of two elderly Asian men across two distinct cultures of Hawaii and Singapore, this programme traces the contours of a shifting masculinity – one where familiar ideas of strength, usefulness, and independence begin to subtly loosen, but still perseveres.
Together, the films trace how aging men inhabit domestic spaces not as sites of authority, but as places where roles evolve, where anatomical decline is quietly questioned, and where presence itself becomes the measure of connection.
Image courtesy of filmmaker.
16min | G | English & Chinese with English subtitles
Centering around the traditional occasion of the family dinner in Singapore, Gladys Ng explores the figure of the silent provider, where care is inscribed alongside time and age on weather hands, faces and love.
Awards
2015 Winner for Best Singapore Short Film| Singapore International Short Film Festival
Image courtesy of filmmaker.
85min | PG | English and Japanese with English subtitles
Grandpa Tom lives a full life – he smashes multiple pushups with ease, prepares his own elaborate meals, and conjures colourful critiques of movie scripts.
Yet against the backdrop of picturesque Hawaii, within the interiority of home lies a portrait of a man navigating grief, loneliness, independence, desire, and a body that refuses to cooperate.
Funny, sassy and intimately lensed, 95 and 6 To Go explores ability and perseverance in the midst of a declining body.
Awards
Image courtesy of filmmaker.
Ticketed admission
Films will be screened consecutively as listed.
Showtimes (16 May – 28 Jun)
16, 23 & 30 May (Sat): 7pm
27 May (Wed, PH): 11am
Total duration: 110min
In Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988) and The So‑Called Caryatids (1984), Agnès Varda turns her camera toward the female body at moments when it has traditionally been held up as ideal: young, sculptural, and symbolically charged – only to gently undo them in her signature cinematic style.
Image courtesy of MK2 Films.
12min | Rating TBA | French with English subtitles
Varda turns her camera this time on the sculpted female neo-classical statues found throughout Paris, Fance, where she takes us on a playful tour of the female form in history and the image of women in collective memory.
Image courtesy of MK2 Films.
97min | M18 (Nudity & Sexual References) | French and English with English subtitles
Made at a moment when Jane Birkin was widely regarded as having passed her youthful peak, Jane B. par Agnès V. deliberately dismantles the idea of a single anatomical or cultural ‘prime’.
Staging Birkin between roles, costumes, fantasies, and conversations, and often drifting between colourfully elaborate scenes and intimate exchanges, Varda conjures a new ideal grounded in self-ownership, play, and time.
Image courtesy of MK2 Films.
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