Description
About the Author

Singapore: A Cinematic Portrait traces how the island has been seen, imagined, and reinvented on screen—from early colonial newsreels to contemporary cinema. Written by Raphaël Millet, the book spans 125 years of film history, shaped by colonialism, decolonisation, and independence, and viewed through local and foreign lenses.

It brings multi-language Asian cinemas into a shared chronology, foregrounding films while addressing archival gaps through rare sources. Framed by the ideas of Nanyang and Nusantara, it reveals a plural, transnational cinema. Since the 1990s, currents of nostalgia and melancholy have reflected the tensions of rapid change, memory, and erasure—capturing a city continually lived, lost, and reimagined through film.
Raphaël Millet is a film scholar, writer, director and producer based between France and Singapore since 2002. Trained in political science and film studies in Paris, he has taught cinema, worked with France Télévisions and the French National Centre of Cinema (CNC), and written widely on European, Middle Eastern and Asian cinemas.

A specialist on Singapore cinema, he is the author of Le Cinéma de Singapour (2003) and Singapore Cinema (2006), and a contributor to Positif, Trafic, Les Cahiers du cinéma and BiblioAsia. In 2005, he co-created Screen Singapore, the first major retrospective of the nation’s cinema, and has advised institutions including the Centre Pompidou.

As a documentary filmmaker, his work explores cinema history and culture. His Singapore-related films—Gaston Méliès and His Wandering Star Film Company, Chaplin in Bali and The Capitol of Singapore—are held in the Asian Film Archive.

Authors

Singapore: A Cinematic Portrait