Long Long Long Time Ago Film Analysis

Long Long Time Ago follows the journey of a family through the years from their humble kampong to a modern HDB flat from 1965 to the early 1970s. It is a film that touches on many aspects of Singapore’s early development-independence, modernisation, transformation of Singapore into a business hub. The central theme that really stood out is gender discrimination, whereas males are regarded as more superior than females. The film shows us how people in the past perceived and act according to their genders.
The story begins on 9 August 1965, Zhao Di and her daughters were chased out by her husband’s family in the city and forced to return to her own family in the kampong. She eventually gave birth to twins, one girl and one boy. However, she was forced to give up the female twin due to the belief that the female twin will bring bad luck to the family. This is only the beginning of the many challenges Zhao Di will face in her later years.
The film shows us that gender discrimination exists and affects one’s position in the family. Gender discrimination can be first observed in the first scene of the movie when Zhao Di and her daughters got chased out of her husband’s family. This is primarily because of Zhao Di’s inability to give birth to male descendant for the family. Even though Zhao Di’s daughters are also the

It is undeniable that gender discrimination still exists in contemporary Singapore (Vaswani 2015). However, we cannot deny that gender discrimination now is not as bad as before. There are more women graduates, more women politicians, more women as leaders (Vaswani 2015). This film shows the audience how much gender roles and discrimination has changed over the years, it allows the audience, especially women appreciate and be thankful of how this harsh gender discrimination is just a thing of the