Restored footage from the British Film Institute takes Singapore back to 1900, starting with early Pathe Brothers shorts like 'Coolie Boys' and 'Ananas'. The archive, much of it never shown before, follows dockers hauling cargo, rickshaw pullers working the streets, Sikh policemen on patrol, and child laborers, alongside rarer scenes of a grand Peranakan funeral and Hindu fire-walking. Newly-discovered home movies pull back the curtain on the colony's elite, a sharp contrast to the grinding labor shown elsewhere in the film. Historians, writers, and filmmakers appear throughout to explain what the camera caught and what it left out, building a picture of a genuinely multicultural port city where wealth and hardship sat side by side. Jenny Agutter narrates, and the footage is set against a specially composed score with modern graphics filling in context where the film stock alone cannot. The result is a detailed, image-led record of colonial Singapore's streets, ceremonies, and working people rather than a top-down political history.