Rachel and her two friends explore an abandoned railway track that runs through a dense forest, but an unforeseen incident brings their little adventure to an abrupt end. Elsewhere, 26-year-old Rachel rekindles an old friendship with a high school friend. When a little boy from her past reappears, Rachel finds herself retracing a trail of iron and wood. Wistful and mysterious, the film depicts a world littered with incongruity, absences and traces of childhood dreams.

The project RED DRAGONFLIES started with the filmmaker’s discovery of a home-video tape, which documented a hike through an abandoned railway track back in his high school days. More than just mere personal memories, the video reveals an intertwined relationship between the place, the people and the time: there is something displaced yet strangely coherent about a group of 17-year-olds dressed in red and white T-shirts and black track pants, walking through an overgrown railway in the early months of 2002. The filmmaker conceived the film from personal memories of growing up and sentiments about a point in life where one starts to rethink childhood dreams, the purpose of work, and the pursuit of happiness. The film also depicts a series of portraits of places. In a city undergoing rapid redevelopment, Singapore’s old towns, aging infrastructures and icons of the previous century are being torn down or refurbished.

Upon the completion of the film, parts of the abandoned railway tracks were demolished to make way for the expansion of a Buddhist temple in the neighborhood; other segments were barricaded for redevelopment. By filming slices of life in these places and realigning them in the context of the story, the film essentially captures and preserves the collective memories of different generations of people, and how they affect the characters in both profound and mundane ways.