You’re likely to be familiar with a game and its variants known all around the world by several different names — including jacks, dibs, asyk, or, in Mandarin, 抓石子 (zhuā shí zi, literally meaning “picking up stones”) — where a player throws one stone up in the air and picks up a new stone while catching the first one before it hits the ground. Malaysian filmmaker Chia Chee Sum uses this game as a unique central device in his debut feature, Oasis of Now, through the universality and simplicity of the game — allowing it to be played quickly on and off and by anybody.
The film premiered late last year at the Busan International Film Festival and also screened earlier this year in Berlinale’s Forum section. Oasis of Now most recently took home the Special Mention (second prize) at the 18th Five Flavours Asian Film Festival in Warsaw, Poland.
Oasis of Now firmly emerges as a quiet, special film that requires all of one’s dedicated attention; when you give in to the film, it gently transfixes, serving as a very welcome reverse of restless doom-scrolling by highlighting a distinct visual style and doing away with a forward-propelled narrative. The story unfolds almost entirely within and around an old Kuala Lumpur apartment compound, with Chia more interested in capturing the surroundings rather than any characters’ movement or speech.
Hanh (Ta Thi Diu), an undocumented Vietnamese woman, works a variety of odd jobs and interacts with families and people of all ages. Every few days, she sits in the apartment’s open-air stairwell and meets with a young girl — the woman preferring to speak Vietnamese and the girl preferring to speak Mandarin. We discover the Mandarin-speaking girl is actually Hanh’s daughter, Ting Ting (Aster Yeow Ee), who lives not with her mother but with a Malaysian family, presumably Hanh’s way of offering her daughter a more comfortable life. Only these ephemeral moments can pass between the duo, a bittersweet snapshot of motherly (and migrant) love and sacrifice.
The filmmaker blends professional and non-professional actors in his cast, the film’s themes also bringing to mind other recent works like Nele Wohlatz’s Sleep with Your Eyes Open — which pulls together transnational and diasporic threads through objects lost and found but ultimately keeps its focus on how discrete stories and experiences make up a unique whole. On the other hand, Oasis of Now sets viewers in one place and creates a sense of spatial dwelling by way of interactions between different people, concentrating on the collective fabric rather than the brief intersections of single strands.
Characters also bounce between Vietnamese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Malay, and at one point Burmese, with sound designer Ng Chor Guan layering in sound, tone, and meaning through the steady environmental input of birds chirping, kids laughing, toy sound effects, and other ambient apartment noises.
The film’s title shouldn’t be lost on viewers: Chia’s unique directing style forces us to remain resolutely in the moment through the immaculately still camerawork of director of photography Jimmy Gimferrer (who also lensed Amanda Nell Eu’s bold, genre-bending Malay-language debut, Tiger Stripes). The filmmaker typically finds a place for the camera and keeps it there, often seemingly leaving the characters as an afterthought. Bodies are frequently obscured or even out of sight with a heavy focus on the objects, furniture, clothes, and architectural pieces that make up the lives of the characters, the people simply weaving in and out of the pre-existing construction. However, Chia continues to cultivate a sense of life through the surroundings; the items themselves are never static and constantly respond to aspects of the space, whether through shadows or wind and air movement.
Curiously, we never actually witness mother and daughter directly playing the stone-based game together; we can only infer they do based on the interactions they have. The lack of communal play draws out a disconnect that has formed between the two out of sheer circumstance. But this isn’t a story about the pair unequivocally growing apart without return. It’s quite the opposite. Like a slinky pulled to its limit and then allowed to fold up again, Oasis of Now shows how two lives are separated in order to be brought back together, also made symbolic through the stone game until the gentle clinking of rocks sounds like music to our ears.
