Small Hours of the Night

A telephone, an ashtray, a tape recorder, a rough corner of the wall – these are among the only objects we see in the opening movement of Singaporean filmmaker Daniel Hui’s austere chamber drama Small Hours of the Night. A woman is being interrogated in a dark room by a stern young man on a rainy night. As the hours pass, identities and historical time periods begin to blur. Her testimony becomes a scrambled, personal record of her country’s complicated legal history.