Fatal Reaction: Singapore

For the second episode of her four-part series about the question why so many highly educated women have difficulties finding a suitable life partner, filmmaker Marijke Jongbloed went to Singapore. Because of growing prosperity and improved perspectives, an increasing number of Singapore women have received a training in the past twenty years. The consequence of their greater independence, however, is that as much as 40% of them is single. These women no longer feel cut out for the traditional role of mother and housewife. The government has devised complete strategies to pair off highly educated people. They even went as far as setting up a professional matchmaking office that organises subsidised cruises where these people can meet. In contrast to New York where the 'self help' culture flourishes among single women, in Singapore the problem of the female (and male) singles has been turned into an explicitly political one due to government intervention. It is terrifying to see that these social engineering programmes are in fact intended to provide Singapore with intelligent offspring. They lack any real emancipatory objectives. Since the BBC made a documentary about the government-initiated matchmaking office SDU, the result of which was not appreciated by the Singapore authorities, all requests by Western camera crews go straight into the wastepaper basket. Nevertheless Marijke Jongbloed has succeeded in depicting the life in a city where everything is as efficiently regulated as in Huxley's 'Brave New World'. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)