Fri 27 Feb 2026, 7.30pm to 9.30pm | Objectifs Platform
Screening Rating: PG
Entry by donation at the door. Suggested donation $10-$15 (RSVP here)
It’s been 10 years since Singapore Minstrel hit our screens! In line with the spirit of busking, we’re marking this anniversary with a special outdoor screening of the film. Join us as we revisit Salty Xi Jie Ng’s documentary on the local busking community, including an exclusive look at bonus features and a post-screening conversation with Salty and the film’s star, Roy Payamal.
Roy Payamal is the wildest busker of a country ranked the world’s most emotionless society. He takes his undermined line of work as a serious art- but is his faith impossible idealism or an admirable conviction? Singapore Minstrel is an invitation into his beautiful mind, a magical, trying universe where art and life dialogue in a tropical dream.
An old-time pioneer of the local scene, sometimes dubbed the ‘Silver Man’, Roy creates spectacular installations for his mind-boggling acts. His street colleagues are a troupe of offbeat, seasoned buskers– from a 70-year-old who dances Gangnam Style with vitality, to a lovable guitarist struggling to pass state busking auditions. The film flows kaleidoscopically from interviews to fantasy sequences, and raw footage of everyday life Roy captures on his mobile phone.
Unraveling Roy’s busking journey and the nation’s bureaucratic reach, the film spotlights a gang of eccentric underdogs, examining what culture means in a hard-fisted, glittering metropolis. Singapore Minstrel is about trying to paint the meaning of freedom and magic. It is about being human.
Featuring original music by Roy, Lee Wen, and AhLian Rok Minah Rolll.
About The Filmmaker
Salty Xi Jie Ng is an artist, performer, and educator working in the interdimensional, intimate vernacular. Serving an enchanted process guided by the mantic and divinatory, her transdisciplinary practice is an alchemical site in collaboration with people and their lives. In hopes of transmuting hidden selves and histories in kinship with the other-than-human, she tends to the erotic, ancestry, ageing, the inner worlds of older women, the end-of-life, and relationships with the departed and spirit worlds, while examining artistic labour and what gets to be called art. Her practice has been supported by Singapore Art Museum, 136GOETHELAB, Taipei Artist Village (Taiwan), Shedhalle (Switzerland), Arko Art Museum (Korea), Museum Why (Sweden), Signal Fire (USA), and more. Salty is the 2024 recipient of the Chamberlain Award for social practice artists from the Headlands Centre for the Arts.
When: 27 Feb 2026, 7.30pm - 9.30pm
