The Singapore International Film Festival runs from 21 October to 1 November 2026, and its Undercurrent section is where the programme's boldest experiments live. Now in its sixth edition, Undercurrent gathers eleven moving-image works and performances that stretch cinema into sound art, performance and puppetry, inviting audiences to treat the festival as an art experience rather than a passive screening room.

London-based artist Shaheer Tarar performs 'The Compression Zone' as a live video game, navigating a fantasy dungeon populated by demons and embodiments of compression algorithms that promise easier, faster access to digital information, at a price. The work draws on Tarar's childhood migration from Pakistan to Canada and is updated at every performance.

A double bill pairs Japanese filmmaker Takashi Makino with Australian sound artist Lawrence English. Makino's 'Imagination' is a 34-minute moving-image work assembled from more than 30,000 photographs of cloudless skies taken from the rooftop of Japan's oldest film-developing laboratory, combined with unexposed film left behind after the laboratory closed. The materials were scanned at 8K and took two years to edit, and the screening carries a live score by English. His own piece, 'The Rest is my Ghost', builds from manipulated environmental recordings and amplified frequencies, informed by what he calls 'acid nostalgia': romanticising the past while airbrushing its harsher realities.

Taiwanese writer and filmmaker Chen Wan-Yin and artist Hsu Che-Yu present 'Corporeal Forms: Four Stories', a 45-minute performance with master puppeteer Kuo Chien-Fu that folds traditional Taiwanese glove puppetry into a meditation on whether what is lost can be made present again. It opens with a puppeteer reviving a dead sparrow, then moves through four unusual histories, from a rabbit killed over a swine fever vaccine to the 1979 live-TV separation of conjoined twins. It closes with the world premiere of 'On Memories of Countless Days Away' (2026), a 102-minute experimental feature by Elysa Wendi and Liao Jiekai backed by SGIFF's own film fund in 2022. It follows two friends revisiting their Singapore childhoods and reconstructing a dance for which no recording survives, moving between Singapore and Japan through questions of belonging, ancestry and citizenship.