1 Nov 2025 – 8 Feb 2026
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Daily Screenings |  |
ArtScience Cinema, Level 4 |
Free & Ticketed Admission
Visions of the Future is a screening programme that offers a glimpse of futures shaped by memory, care, and resilience. Grounded by the imaginative depth of speculative fictions and futures, the programme explores stories that subvert dystopian tropes often seen in Western science-fiction films, envisioning possibilities of humanity’s peaceful co-existence with technology and futures embedded in culturally grounded landscapes.
The second half of the programme from January to early February 2026 presents works that imagine alternative futures shaped by ancestral and indigenous knowledge. These films reclaim myth, ritual, and storytelling as pathways to plural futures alive with possibility—challenging binary utopian/dystopian narratives and asserting resistance through imagination.
Line up (5 Jan to 8 Feb 2026)
Daily Screenings – Free Admission
Their presence is felt in the future is a short film programme that features moving image works by Southeast Asian artists Montika Kham-on, Subash Thebe Limbu, Natasha Tontey, and Shi Yun Teo. The programme explores the ways in which ancestral and indigenous knowledge, traditions, and rituals continue to reverberate in the present and shape the far future – reclaiming myth, tradition and storytelling as acts of resistance and liberation that challenge colonial legacies. Through experiments with science fiction tropes and aesthetics, these films examine contemporary anxieties of technology and artificial intelligence, proposing alternative futures where tactility and technology can co-exist.
Total programme duration: 50 minutes
Weekend Screenings – Ticketed
Banner image: Siamese Futurism, 2021, Montika Kham-on
Please note that the cinema will be closed on 24 & 27 Jan.
7 February, Sat - Free Admission with Registration
Screening: 3pm
Artist Q&A: 3.50pm
Join multidisciplinary artist Shi Yun Teo for a post-screening Q&A on Saturday, 7 February, where she will share more about her work spaces as traces, a video essay that draws inspiration from Chinese mythology and rituals to explore cyber-spirituality in the digital age.
spaces as traces is part of the short film programme in Visions of the Future.
8min 40sec | Thai/ Isan with English subtitles
This music video re-images the prophecies of the Phibun rebellion as a futuristic vision for Isaan in order to reverse the stereotypical ‘backward’ temporality assigned to the region and its people. Drawing from the motifs of science fiction, it highlights the Isaan people’s centuries-old, revolutionary imagination envisioning Thailand’s future.
Montika Kham-on is a video artist and filmmaker based in Bangkok. Her practice explores collective fear, speculative visions of the future, and the struggle over definitions outside dominant narratives, she centers emotional landscapes and embodied knowledge. Drawing from theater, dance, and ritual, not as references, but as methods of resistance, her work engages movement as a language in its own right.
Showtimes (1 to 21 Jan)
Mon to Thu: 11am to 6pm
Fri and Sat: 11am to 8pm
Sun: 11am to 1pm
The programme screens at the top of every hour.
14min 56sec | Nepalese with English subtitles
Ladhamba Tayem; Future Continuous ᤗᤠᤎᤠᤶᤒᤠ ᤋᤠᤕᤧᤶ borrows its name from the verbal inflection that specifies an action or state is happening at a particular time in the future; ‘tayem’ being future and ‘ladhamba’ being continuous in Indigenous Yakthung (Limbu) language. The work imagines a conversation between the historical figure Kangsore, an 18th century Yakthung warrior fighting the Gorkha colonial army, and Yakthung time-traveller from a distant future.
Based on Limbu’s critical framework of Adivasi Futurism, the work connects these two people from the same community but from very different timelines — one a reminder of the fight against colonialism, and the other, from a future we might want to strive for. Converging the two timelines, the work situates the viewer in between past and future, asking them to consider their own role within this space-time continuum.
Subash Thebe Limbu is a Yakthung (Limbu) artist from Yakthung Nation (Limbuwan), located in present-day eastern Nepal. He works with film, sound, music, and painting. His Yakthung name is ᤋᤠᤱᤛᤠᤱ Tangsang (Sky). Drawing from socio-political issues, resistance and science/speculative fiction, his works engages the notion of time, climate change, and indigeneity through the critical lens of Adivasi Futurism, a framework he has been developing over several years.
15min 54sec| English, Bahasa Indonesia, Tontemboan with English subtitles
How do we talk with the spirits? Of Other Tomorrows Never Known interweaves notions of care with ancestral knowledge and speculative fiction, threading stories from mythology, archaeological ruins and urban cultures.
The work emerges from Natasha Tontey’s background and personal history of participating in various rituals by communities from Minahasa, an indigenous community in the Northern part of Sulawesi island, Indonesia, offering an insight into Minahasan cosmology and an alternative approach to technology.
Natasha Tontey is a Minahasan artist based in between Jakarta and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her artistic practice predominantly explores the fictional accounts of the history and myths surrounding ‘manufactured fear.’ In her practice, she observes any possibilities of other futures that are projected not from the perspective of major and established institutions, but a subtle and personal struggle of the outcasted entities and beings.
9min 35sec| Mandarin and English with English subtitles
Existing between the domains of architectural, technological and spiritual mediums, ‘spaces as traces’ features found footage, Teo’s body of archival material concerns with Singapore’s architecture and Taoist religious rituals, as well as three-dimensional rendered animation of deities in an imagined science fiction of Chinese mythology. Here, the I Ching engages in a dialogue with artificial intelligence and architectural elements. Spiritual language becomes digital language.
Shi Yun Teo is a multidisciplinary artist, recent graduate from Slade School of Fine Arts, UCL. Her work usually takes the form of photography and filmmaking. She creates narrative and abstract works that feature historic documents, archival footages and personal recordings: visualising how spaces frame communal memory, evoking themes of reincarnation, dislocation, and return.
Ticketed admission
Showtimes
11 Jan (Sun): 2.30pm
18 Jan (Sun): 2.30pm
One of the most influential video-essays of the 1990s, John Akomfrah's genre-bending documentary on black consciousness traces the origins and impact of Afrofuturism through the eyes of a man known as the Data Thief, who seeks the keys to the future.
Featuring interviews and performance clips by artists such as George Clinton, Sun Ra and science fiction authors Samuel R. Delaney and Octavia Butler, Akomfrah amplifies the futuristic tenor of the film by intercutting these scenes with images of Pan-African life from different periods of history, jumping between timelines and generations.
Ticketed admission
Showtimes
11 Jan (Sun): 4pm
18 Jan (Sun): 4pm
In the year 2045, a filmmaker who relocated to Mars attempts to make a film about life on Earth, juxtaposing his own displacement with recordings of the Ruc and Cor peoples, ethnic groups driven from their cave homes and tree houses during the American invasion of Vietnam. This footage is interspersed with American propaganda films depicting the post-war resettlement of these Vietnamese communities.
Combining elements of science fiction and ethnography, The Tree House is a powerful exploration of how time and environment relate to our understanding of home.
86min | Rating PG | No dialogue
Free admission, first-come-first-served basis.
Guardianbot's sole purpose is to care for Celeste, who has grown into a brilliant space cadet off on her first interstellar mission. Guardianbot is thrilled but left to deal with a new emotion it wasn’t programmed for – loneliness.
Based on the graphic novel by Kid Koala, who also makes his directorial debut, Space Cadet is a tomorrow-days’ lullaby about memories and the bonds that connect us. Featuring original songs by Karen O and Digable Planets’ Mariana “Ladybug” Vieria.
135min | PG13 (Brief Nudity) | English
Copyright: © 2023 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Free admission, first-come-first-served basis.
Amidst a future war between the human race and the forces of artificial intelligence, Joshua (John David Washington), a hardened ex-special forces agent grieving the disappearance of his wife (Gemma Chan), is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI who has developed a mysterious weapon with the power to end the war and mankind itself. Joshua and his team of elite operatives journey across enemy lines, into the dark heart of AI-occupied territory… only to discover the world-ending weapon he’s been instructed to destroy is an AI in the form of a young child.
Filmed across Laos, Nepal, Thailand, and Vietnam, The Creator renders a speculative world in which religion, resistance, and AI coexist. The film’s aesthetic - temples, orbital stations, vernacular architectures - constructs a future deeply shaped by its Asian location.
25min per episode | English
Free admission, first-come-first-served basis.
Episode 1: Rosey the Robot
Episode 4: The Coming of Astro
Episode 8: Rosey’s Boyfriend
Episode 23: Dude Planet
Episodes will be played back-to-back
Premiering during the Space Race era, The Jetsons captured the 1960s’ optimistic vision of tomorrow. With its flying cars, robotic helpers, and space-age living, the show reflected a time when technological progress felt limitless. But even with its depiction of a dazzling future and high-tech gadgets, the heart of The Jetsons was its focus on family life – love, work, and daily routines – making this retrofuturistic series an enduring pop cultural touchpoint.
Ticketed admission
In a distant future where machines dominate the universe and the human population has nearly vanished, the android Yoko travels alone in a spaceship resembling an old Japanese villa, delivering parcels to last few remaining humans. As Yoko moves through desolated planets, the curious android reflects on humanity’s nostalgic desires, and what it means to be human.
A lo-fi, sci-fi arthouse film by Sion Sono, The Whispering Star marks a contemplative shift from the filmmaker’s maximalist style, blending quiet sci-fi with poetic introspection, with nods to Kubrick and Tarkovski in a meditative exploration of solitude and technological legacy.
Ticketed admission
Monsieur Hulot finds himself lost in a hyper-modern, ultra-sleek version of Paris, filled with overcomplicated gadgets and rows of reptitive architecture.
The sprawling set, known as ‘Tativille’, was specially constructed for the film at the edge of Paris. The detailed steel-and-glass cityscape took over three years to complete and was shot on 70mm, making it one of the most expensive, and impressive, French films to be made at the time. Despite becoming a commercial failure at its release, Playtime is now considered to be Jacques Tati’s magnum opus, and one of the greatest films ever made.
Jacques Tati’s masterpiece is both critique and prophecy of modern life, calling for a more balanced future with technology that embraces warmth, colour and the messy humanness of it all.
Ticketed admission
In a mysterious and surreal interzone somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg, the lives of multiple characters interweave with each other in surprising and tender ways.
An homage to Iranian cinema with Canadian inflections, Matthew Rankin’s absurdist comedy finds its heart and humour across borders, language and identities. The alternative world of Universal Language is infused with warmth, carrying a hopeful message that our relationship with one another is not predicated on differences, but perhaps in gestures of care and understanding.
Awards:
Directors’ Fortnight Audience Award | Cannes Film Festival 2024
Arthouse Cinema Award | Hamburg Film Festival 2024
Bright Horizons Award | Melbourne International Film Festival 2024
Best Canadian Feature Film | Vancouver International Film Festival 2024
Futures Festival: Worlds in the Making is an invitation to hold the future open. It brings together the community in a shared exploration of plural worlds emerging from the equator — worlds that are generous, resilient and already in the making.
Fill your world with wonder in a purpose-built screening room dedicated to films that will inspire, challenge and transform.
Reimagine what’s “real” in our new permanent gallery, filled with virtual experiences from the minds of artists, scientists and curators.