During the outbreak of COVID-19 cases in Singapore’s migrant workers dormitories, I was approached by Lianan Films to help with a documentary that would investigate the realities of the situation in the dormitories.

I joined in the capacity of a researcher, primarily to find contacts and speak to people who lived in the dormitories, collecting stories and footage that would give the production team insights about the situation.

During this time, the state media was portraying manicured depictions of the dormitories that did not match with the actual realities that many of the workers were struggling with, such as overcrowded dormitories and lack of transparency. Hearing directly from the migrant workers and eventually sharing their perspectives was therefore crucial. I managed to speak with many workers to hear about their experiences and received many videos from them, some of which ended up in the final cut of the documentary. To make sure that we would not jeopardise the workers’ jobs or their rights to stay in Singapore, we also had to work around security issues and anonymise identities.

Working on this project during the height of the pandemic was emotional for me. I felt a huge dissonance, receiving disturbing footage and stories from the migrant workers about their living conditions, while sitting comfortably at my desk in my family home. The disparity was huge and my privilege was made very obvious to me - I felt pangs of guilt, but more than that I felt a greater push to use my privilege to speak up.