Last Saturday evening, the editors of CORRESPONDENCE crowded into the back of a small classroom at the Goethe-Institut. We joined a full house for “A Tactile Gastronomical Encounter”, the first event of the 2026 season hosted by independent film collective FFIGS. Donning a towering chef’s hat, the programmer shared the inspiration behind his curation: the effects of the environment on his body during long walks around his neighbourhood. By pairing short films about Singapore’s physical environment with snacks of related taste and texture, he sought to turn the viewing of films into an embodied experience, expanding what it means to “consume” media.
The first course was a rainbow kueh lapis served with Ben Tan Kai Xiang and Grace Cheu Li Qing’s prismatic animation Mountain Mountain (2025). The film opens with two siblings in a cable car ascending to the peak of Mount Faber — a misnomer, since Mount Faber is, technically, a hill. Like a child stretching out the pleasures of a dessert, the film peels back layers of memories, as the characters recall their childhood longing to see actual mountains in all their majesty. The nostalgic treat returned us to our younger selves, our yearning to scale the grandest heights and stand before vast vistas of possibility.
The theme of innocence lost, and rediscovered, continued with Joshua Ashley Pereira’s Cloudy (2023), a short animation about a lonely man who befriends a little cloud and finds renewed purpose in sustaining his new companion until it rejoins its parent cloud. This film was accompanied by cotton candy, the fluffy pink confection reminiscent of the film’s titular character. But the soft pillow of sugar had crystallised into rock candy by the time it was handed to us, reminding us of droplets gathering into clouds, or grains of sand coalescing into solid ground. An inadvertent metaphor for sedimentation and solidification, which turned out to be the perfect segue into the next film, Carin Leong’s Sandcastles (2024). The documentary parallels the fates of two Singapores: Singapore, Singapore shores up its progress through land reclamation, while Singapore, Michigan, a once-prosperous 19th-century lumber town, is now buried under sand dunes caused by soil erosion from prolonged deforestation. This cautionary tale came with a side of peanut muah chee, glutinous rice cakes coated in ground peanuts, of the same colour and gritty mouthfeel as sand. The crumbs slipped between our teeth, reflecting the futility of keeping up with Singapore’s endless pursuit of territorial expansion and economic growth.
Given Singapore’s rapid urban redevelopment, our relationship to our neighbourhoods and the natural world often becomes collateral damage — the focus of Like Shadows Through Leaves (2021) by Lucy Davis and the Migrant Ecologies Project. Introducing the film, FFIGS passed around the final course of crispy mealworms and tom yum-flavoured crickets to loud gasps in the room. Despite the initial hesitation, the audience was soon knocking back handfuls of insects as the documentary transported us into the forests around Tanglin Halt, a vacated housing estate that echoes with the symphony of birdsong and the stories of former residents. The earthy scent of the crickets and mealworms made us feel like a flock of birds, anticipating a not-too-distant future where bugs might well replace popcorn as a default movie snack.
With our media diet largely comprising content from social feeds and streaming platforms, our visual and auditory senses are constantly engaged. “A Tactile Gastronomical Encounter” enlists the other senses — smell, taste, and touch — by finding edible equivalents to the moods, images, and characters onscreen. As we bit into keuh lapis and munched on mealworms, the films took on a physical form, meeting our tongues and passing into our bodies, to be digested more fully.
This season at FFIGS will continue with more exciting offerings, from screenings to performances, powerpoint parties to industry sharing sessions. If you’re an aspiring critic keen to document these off-beat events, apply to our first writing workshop, Roving Correspondents. The programme will be run by film writer Sasha Han, who has been part of critics labs in Locarno Film Festival, Far East Film Festival, and the Singapore International Film Festival. Her writing has been published by the Asian Film Archive, Documentary Magazine, Film Comment, Literary Hub, MARG1N Magazine, Mekong Review, and the Singapore Film Society. Her film programmes have been presented in Festival Film Dokumenter and Queer East.
Selected writers will be guided to produce short-form writing in response to a series of community events.
You can find more details on the programme here. Applications close 17 April 2026, so register your interest now and help us spread the word!