What’s softest in the world rushes and runs over what’s hardest in the world.

by Charmaine Poh

Singapore, 2024

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short, 15m

streaming regions:  GLOBAL

EN
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synopsis

What’s softest… is a glimpse of queer parenthood in Singapore, where such families are illegitimate under the eyes of the law. Like Kin, the hybrid documentary film combines interview material with a constructed communal space for play and imagination. The film’s title is taken from Ursula K. Le Guin’s rendition of the Dao De Jing and refers to the dichotomy of water and stone. By gathering sensibilities of the natural world, Eastern cosmology, and interdependence, “What’s softest…” presents queerhood as an open field of possibility, one brimming with life that is to come.

about the filmmakers

Charmaine Poh (b. 1990) is an artist from Singapore working across media, moving image, and performance to peel apart, interrogate, and hold ideas of agency, repair, and the body across worlds. She aligns herself with strategies of visibility, opacity, deviance, and futurity.

She has exhibited at the Singapore Art Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art, Blindspot Gallery, REDCAT LA, Huis Marseille, and the 60th Venice Biennale – Foreigners Everywhere, among others. In 2019, she was one of Forbes Asia’s 30 under 30 in the arts. Her work has been collected by Vega Foundation, Sunpride Foundation, and KADIST. She was recently named Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year for 2025.

Based between Berlin and Singapore, she is a co-founder of the magazine Jom and a member of Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research (AFSAR).

English