Singapore – Channel NewsAsia, in partnership with the National Heritage Board (NHB), is organising a special screening of an episode of Footprints, a Channel NewsAsia premium series on Singapore’s earliest migrant communities. The episode Settled Land, about the Chinese immigrants, is in Mandarin and will be shown at the National Museum – Gallery Theatre on July 26 at 6pm.
The special screening is a programme under NHB’s Singapore Heritage Fest 2014. Then from August 10 after the 10pm news, MediaCorp Channel 8 will begin telecasting the Footprints series in Mandarin, featuring the Chinese, Malay, Indian and Eurasian communities.
Executive Producer of the Footprints series, Ong Lay Hong, said: “The programme is thoroughly researched and is produced with some of the latest media technology and enactments that make viewing a sheer entertainment. At the same time, it takes viewers through the course of a very important part of Singapore’s history to understand how we had forged a life and identity on the island. The series, first shown on Channel NewsAsia in March, has been adapted in Mandarin so as to reach a wider audience.”
The episode for the special screening, Settled Land, is the second in the series focusing on the Chinese ethnic group. For more than a millennium, millions of Chinese emigrated to the region they called the Southern Ocean – modern Southeast Asia. They came to find refuge and to escape poverty, persecution and starvation. They came too as explorers and diplomats. Many were drawn to a little red dot close to the equator – the island of Singapore. Here in just two centuries, they forged a new identity and helped build a new nation.
Footprints is a four-part documentary series that brings to life the story of Singapore’s dynamic early communities and neighbourhoods. Over two centuries, people came from every part of Asia to make new lives for themselves. In the milieu of colonial Singapore, at the crossroads of the world, they transformed from being disparate migrants, traders and subjects of the British to becoming people with a newfound sense of identity and destiny.
