Eric Khoo’s 12 Storeys brings to light the private, parallel lives of the inhabitants of Housing and Development Board (HDB) block of apartments that would otherwise be contained within its four walls. Like Lilian Chee, Khoo uses an intimate method of reading the HDB and its inhabitants, communicating more accurately the lived experience of the HDB than a technical architectural analysis would have allowed. The “embodied details” of the occupant lie in the cinematic topography of the film — Khoo’s adroit use of framing often emphasises the human body and its gestures, subtly conveying an inhabitant’s psychological state even in the absence of dialogue. The body becomes a kind of architecture that exposes excess: what is contained within the character’s psyche slips through the cracks of physicality, writing itself onto the body...

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