Singaporeans love to point fingers at Yishun, one of the country’s famed public housing estates, with some 200,000 residents and more than its fair share of headlines. A spate of cat killings. A drug lord. A triple murder. Loan sharks. Rats.

For filmmaker, writer and TV showrunner Ler Jiyuan, Yishun is both home and inspiration. But not because of its dramatic potential inherent in extreme characters or headline situations.

His latest work, Invisible Stories for HBO Asia, is not sensational or dramatic, he says. The six-episode series, set in a fictional housing estate, tells everyday stories of ordinary people living their lives, working things out, sometimes not getting it right, but usually carrying on somehow.

Ler is not trying to shed light into the darkest corners. He also doesn’t appear to hang any value on telling poignant untold stories. And he’s not swayed in any way by HBO’s funding arrangement with the Singapore government’s Infocomms Media Development Authority (IMDA).

Invisible Stories was born as a short film about a single mother struggling to cope with her autistic teenage son. Ler’s producer suggested he pitch it to HBO Asia, which he did with few expectations.

“I really thought they only did high-concept stuff, like Half Worlds,” he says. “I’m just a storyteller. I don’t think about what the market wants or what HBO’s audience is. I just think about doing good stories. That’s all”.

Invisible Stories premieres later this year and is the 38-year-old Ler’s most ambitious work as a producer. The series showcases the “lives of people you see everyday but never really think about who they are, what their stories are. That’s the starting point. Some of the stories are quite dark, I wouldn’t say all, they’re just about more marginalised alienated people,” he says.

The decision to focus on migrant workers in two of the episodes is a “real reflection of Singapore,” Ler says. But the stories are “extremely difficult to write... when you write a migrant episode, you tend to split into the very dramatic ‘run in with the law’ kind of story or the evil employer story. I was trying to avoid all of those things because it separates people even more. I would like to paint them as everyday people, who have friends, who have passions, who have dreams, who fall in love. If they were not born in another country, if they were born in Singapore, they could have been your friends, they could have been your lover even.”

The multi-national cast includes actors from Singapore, Bangladesh, Indonesia Malaysia and Thailand. Like the even split between men/women, diversity is a by-product of stories he found most interesting rather than a goal. “The starting point for this series is stories, and not racial representation or anything like that,” Ler says.

Like 80% of Singapore, Ler grew up in the 1990s in a three-room apartment on a Housing Development Board (HDB) estate. His father was a taxi driver. “My childhood was really normal, very common,” he says, describing himself as “just a really normal dude” who grew up in a three-room flat and is now moving with his wife into his own three-room flat.”

He became a filmmaker after he failed his A levels (“I suck at science”), worked through an existential crisis, was in a band, and realised he would never be a rock star. His other passion was film.

Invisible Stories is “the culmination of what I have always worked and stand for, of everything right now in my life,” Ler says. “My films are always about HDB life, normal life.... it’s the world that I came from. It’s an expression of who I am.”

Published on ContentAsia eNewsletter, 22 July 2019