A Better Place Than This (Movie)

A Better Place Than This is a short film about a Singapore death-row guard who tries to help a young woman convicted of drug trafficking come to accept her fate despite a bizarre contradiction - he is her executioner.

The film was inspired by the real life executioner Darshan Singh who since 1959 estimates he has hanged up to 1000 condemned men and women, each at the crack dawn on any given Friday. But far from a sadistic mass-murderer, in interviews Darshan comes off as a charismatic and spiritual man, filled with equal amounts of humility and humour. He felt a spiritual bond with his common man and took it upon himself to counsel the men and women on death row, even befriending his eventual victims. He listened to their hopes, fears and dreams, and helped them come to grips with their fate. Some would accept only Darshan as their executioner and even included him in their final will and testament, entrusting him until the utterance of those ominous words: “I am going to send you to a better place than this." For more in formation on Darshan, see Alan Shadrake’s book Once a Jolly Hangman.

We shot A Better Place Than This on beautiful Kodak Vision 3, Super-16 in Los Angeles and Singapore. We are looking for finishing funds to move us out of Post Production and into a festival near you!

DIRECTOR WHO?

Daniel was born in Singapore and raised in Singapore, Jakarta, Sydney and Los Angeles. While reading Philosophy and Journalism at the University of Sydney he was extremely active in Sydney’s theatre scene before moving onto distribution at ICON Films Australia in 2007. He subsequently lived in Beijing as a freelance journalist and wrote for such publications as YEN, Dazed & Confused, The Sydney Morning Herald, Arena UK and Vice Magazine. In the midst of the Olympic Games, he returned to Los Angeles to pursue an MFA in Film Production at the University of Southern California. Most recently his screenplay for the short Blackbird was a Semi-Finalist for the 2011 Student Academy Awards for Best Dramatic Short.

ORIGINAL SOURCE
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