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A young woman goes on an anonymous journey to her late husband's hometown Leshan, a small city in Sichuan province. There, she meets an old friend, a local theatre actress preparing for an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan (Sichuan). In a home-place unfamiliar, the traveling woman meets the imaginary. Ghosted by Shen Te the protagonist of the play, the actress loses the self at the intersection between fiction and reality. Unprepared, the filmmaker loses control of her camera. Together, they drift into a polyrhythmic experience of stasis.
A young woman reminisces about her deceased grandmother, whose volatile personality troubled and confused her as a child.
A precocious twelve-year-old girl embarks on a surreal journey of self-discovery upon following her survivalist brother into the woods for a hunt.
"Sandcastles" parallels two Singapores: one in Southeast Asia, and one buried on the western coast of Michigan. On top of sharing the same name, these two places also share a fraught relationship with sand. Singapore, Michigan was a thriving lumber town in the late 19th century until erosion from mass deforestation caused the sand dunes around it to shift and swallow the town whole. Just as quickly as Singapore, Michigan disappeared under sand, its namesake in the East emerged from it through land reclamation. The film weaves a narrative that intertwines the two Singapores to depict the temporal nature of human edifices built on and destroyed by nothing more than sand.
