Invisible City by Tan Pin Pin

I finally caught Invisible City tonight. Good thing they extended it, or else I would have missed it altogether.

It was an interesting documentary. It's set in current times and shows people talking about the past, from the young local archaelogist to past filmmakers, photographers and curators, and even activists of the past.

It dawned on me, looking from our current modern times, how fast Singapore has changed, that such memories has been lost. Looking at the past footage or pictures, we are so far from the past. The poignant question asked by one interviewee was that if no footage was taken, does it mean it never existed...to me, it translated to possible obliteration from all memories.

Also, some of the interviewees were rather old and you could see that their memories were already fading. Would our heritage/past be lost eventually?

One of the striking part of the film was the portion where Ivan Polunin's footage was shown as a blank footage as he narrated while he was shooting his old films. Ivan was a filmmaker/photographer who captured mainly plants & flowers of Singapore & Malaysia during the late 1950s, especially for medicinal purposes. He also captured some lifestyle of tribes and people in the region. Anyway, he was trying to digitise his films by shooting & recording them onto DV tapes or HD DVDs. The blank footage was impactful as the word "invisible" came clear then (after all it's called "Invisible City" right?). As he narrates, you see nothing and what he describes seems invisible to you and you can only imagine what he was actually talking about.
He had answered earlier that he was of course worried that the films would be lost, that's why he's doing some self-digitisation, and even as his memory is fading, he himself is trying to sort out & record what they are about and archiving them, hence the narration (there was not much speech, if any at all, in the films). Even he has some trouble doing so, so how would others be able to understand if nothing is done? Can you imagine the significance of memories lost? And it also emphasizes if something is deemed non-existent if it is not recorded.

Does invisibility = non-existence? Is there a broken link between the past & present?