In the previous chapters, I laid out the theoretical scaffold to hesitantly think through the temporal identifications of the person living with dementia vis-à-vis the person not living with dementia and other (non-)living phenomena, suggesting that the temporal methodology proposed offers a way to not only think through the ecologies of temporal performances but to also heterogeneously unfurl and surface the ‘hidden’ and previously neglected aspects of the past in the present. In this chapter, I tie all these threads of argument together through the case study of Singapore and its cinema, and I explore the ways in which the trope of the person living with dementia wandering becomes a way to enter and traverse the nation's discursive sphere of history and historiography.

Singapore and Singapore cinema have been chosen as the chapter's focus because the nation and the nation's cinema take on a particular inflection that results in an architectural environment that has apparently little or no history attached to it. This is an environment in which the nation's revival cinema post-1995 displays a seeming amnesia and aphasia towards its cinematic history and bears little or no resemblance to the ‘golden age’ of Singapore cinema from 1947 to 1972, where Singapore served as a hub for Malay-language film production in the region. Beyond this, the nation displays a peculiar habit of regularly banning and censoring films made about Singapore by people who live in Singapore because these films do not correlate to the state's sanctioned history, forcing Singapore film-makers to adopt pragmatic film-making strategies to avoid censorship (Khoo 2015). In short, both Singapore and its cinema rely heavily on unstable and often conflicting versions of the past in order to come to a certain understanding of the present.

In this chapter, through the analysis of the short film Parting (Boo Junfeng, 2015, Singapore), where the presence of the person living with dementia is integral to the film's narrative, I explore the complexities of memory, of forgetting and of remembering, through the framework of temporal performance. The issues at stake here are twofold. First, this chapter examines the trope of the person living with dementia wandering in relation to the film and puts forward an understanding of wandering as that of both traversing space and time.