THE VISIT
DIRECTED BY MORRIE TAN SHU ZHEN
SINGAPORE // 2021
9 MINS
A young girl visits her father in prison. The glass in-between would never separate them anyways.
Reflective Encounters
“Morrie Tan’s short is an impressively intimate and personal look at prisons and families. Atmosphere is created through dedicated attention to precise details: the texture of waiting room walls, the creaking hinges of heavy doors. Sets are created with meticulous care, revealing a filmmaker painfully familiar with this environment. A sense of place is also articulated through a close, observant camera. Repeated shots of the daughter’s hands, clasped in anxiety, recall the detail-obsessed French director Robert Bresson.
Tan’s short operates as both a personal reflection on family, and a larger inquiry into how we are distanced from each other. Technology, often sold on promises of further socialising, is here revealed as nothing but a hindrance. The prison’s faulty internet connection leads to an achingly tense scene, executed with precise, careful editing. It’s this specific sense of pain which elevates the film into being universal, even to viewers unaffected by incarceration. Both characters are made with felt-like materials, a technique which creates an eccentric ‘boiling’ effect on their skin’s surface. Tan joins a roster of animators who have fallen for the strange qualities of felted puppets, such as Anna Mantzaris (Enough, 2017), or Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels (This Magnificent Cake!, 2018).”
— Chris Childs
Director’s Statement
The Visit is an intimate stop-motion short film following Ting as she travels monthly to visit her incarcerated Father. Trapped in a windowless room, she is nonetheless offered an opportunity for connection through the confined spaces of the prison.
Over the course of her visits with her Father, she attempts to reconnect with her Father, their relationship transcending the glass and the barriers between them. The film is a story of longing and reconciliation for a family, and a love letter from a daughter to her father.
Ting’s story, and mine, is one that is not often portrayed - of the repercussions and the struggles of a child whose parent is serving time and the seemingly mundane things that she has to go through or face.
Through the film, what begins seemingly as a grudge and dread towards the circumstances, is slowly revealed through the relationship between the two characters, that sometimes emotions and circumstances are complex and multi-layered. Her weariness towards the situation ultimately does not disqualify her love for her dad, even if it's not what she imagined it to be.
The use of screens and glass in the prison interior not only serves as a physical barrier between them but also as a symbolic representation for the emotional distance that Ting and her Dad ultimately try to transcend.
Filmmaker Bio
Director/Writer Morrie Tan graduated with a BA (Hons) in Animation Art from LASALLE College of the Arts in 2019. She has a passion for creating and producing stories that are genuine, often drawing inspiration from her own experiences.
Her graduation short film “The Growth” has screened at local film festivals such as Cartoons Underground and Digicon6 in Singapore, as well as international film festivals such as the Korea Independent Animation Film Festival, International Animation Film Festival of Catalonia, and Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film.
“The Visit” is her directorial debut, and a story that is close to her heart.