WHITE SHADOW, 98min., Singapore
Directed by Gloria Chee, Eileen Cheng
An untimely diagnosis of a terminal illness sends Ren Jie into a tailspin. Determined to experience love in the limited time she has left, Ren Jie sets out to give her all to Kai Ting, a premature widow still grieving the tragic death of her husband. Through her relentless pursuit, Kai Ting eventually softens. The two friends who have known each other for decades experience the most powerful emotion – love. A moving journey ensues – two individuals learning to trust, communicate, be brave, and vulnerable, but neither are prepared for the agony and heartache in their inevitable separation.
Get to know writer/director Gloria Chee:
1. What motivated you to make this film?
I made White Shadow because I kept thinking about what happens when death walks into the room before we are ready. Do we become numb and decide life means nothing, or do we suddenly love with a kind of terrifying honesty? Ren Jie and Kai Ting are two people standing in that doorway, between denial and acceptance, fear and devotion, and I wanted to ask what love looks like when there is no time left to perform it politely. For me, this film is about “big love” — love without possession, without gendered rules, without the safety of distance. It is about loving someone as if time is already running out — because it is.
2. From the idea to the finished product, how long did it take for you to make this film?
From the first idea to the finished film, it took about two years but emotionally, I had been carrying it all my life. Some films begin as scripts; this one began as a question that would not leave me alone: if you knew the ending was near, would you still procrastinate or risk loving fully?
I have always known the answer. It has always lived with me in the quietest places — under MRT tracks, in corridors, on pedestrian bridges, in spaces where people are always passing through but rarely arriving. That is why I chose to make this film in liminal spaces: because Ren Jie and Kai Ting are also passing through invisible doorways within themselves. They stand at emotionally unspoken thresholds — the moment before love is confessed, before death is accepted, before fear gives way to tenderness. These are the places where nothing seems to happen, yet everything inside a person changes.
3. How would you describe your film in two words!?
I can’t decide. So please let me have 2 options. Tender Mortality and Big Love.
Because White Shadow is about death being the shadow; love is the light that makes it visible.
But more than that, it is about the tenderness that becomes possible when people stop pretending they are permanent.
4. What was the greatest obstacle you faced in completing this film?
The greatest obstacle was daring to be restraint; not make death loud, love dramatic and pain to announce itself. White Shadow needed the opposite. It needed silence, glances, hesitation, the almost-touch, the breath before someone says what they really mean.
The hardest thing was trusting that the audience would feel the earthquake even if we only showed them the cup trembling on the table. The film lives in the moment before the words come — because sometimes the most difficult truths are often the quietest ones.
5. What is your favorite stage of the filmmaking process?
I don’t have a particular favorite stage. Writing is immensely personal and cathartic. Production and post-production are magical because it is the moment when the film stops belonging only to me. Suddenly the light changes, an actor pauses half a second longer than written, the wind moves through a corridor, and the scene becomes more alive than the plan. There is a beautiful surrender in that. I prepare obsessively, and then I wait and see what the film becomes in front of me.
6. When did you realize that you wanted to make films?
In my teens, when I understood that cinema could hold what ordinary language could not. Some feelings are too fragile for conversation — grief, longing, shame, the kind of love that has no approved name — but on screen, a hallway or a shadow or someone’s hand resting too long on a railing can say everything. I wanted to make films because I have owned and witnessed many silences. And cinema became the place where silence could finally speak.
7. What film have you seen the most times in your life?
I have lost count. In different stages of my life, I watch different films on loop till I can recite the lines. I return to it not for the plot, but for the feeling it leaves in the body — like a bruise you press because somehow it reminds you that you’re alive. The films that stay with me are not the ones that explain everything. They are the ones that leave an imprint in me so much so that days, weeks, months, years later, its visuals or line or feeling creeps into my consciousness unannounced. And so, I believe a great film does not end; it echoes.
8. In a perfect world: Who would you like to work with/collaborate with on a film?
There are many directors whose work I deeply admire, but I don’t feel I’m in a position to speak casually about collaborating with them, so I won’t name names.
I’m drawn to artists who are unafraid to sit with silence, ambiguity, and discomfort; directors who don’t rush to explain the human heart. I hope to work with people who are not only brilliant but truthful. Because talent impresses, but truth stays with you.
9. You submitted to the festival via FilmFreeway. How has your experience been working on the festival platform site?
FilmFreeway made the submission process feel very direct, which matters because independent filmmakers already carry so much invisible labor. There is something strangely vulnerable about pressing “submit”. After years of doubt, drafts, edits, and private terror, your film suddenly leaves your hands and enters the world. So, I’m grateful for any platform that makes that crossing a little less lonely. A submission button can look small, but sometimes it is the door to a new life for a film.
10. What is your favorite meal?
My favorite meal is a good plate of sashimi. There’s something beautiful about its simplicity — the coldness, the texture, the quiet discipline of it. Like cinema, it reminds me that the deepest pleasure is often in what is not overdone.
11. What is next for you? A new film?
Yes. My next film is Unsevered, or 残藕. It is a psychological drama about Maya, a woman who takes refuge in a Buddhist nunnery after devastating trauma, trying not to heal but to disappear — until memory begins to return like weather entering a sealed room.
Where White Shadow asks what love means under the shadow of death, Unsevered asks what survival means after the self has been broken. It is not a film about forgetting pain. It is about building a life strong enough to contain it. The final image I keep returning to is not a miracle, not a cure — just hands that were once clenched, finally open, resting in the present. She is not cured. She is whole.
