Hollywood, CA (The Hollywood Times) 9/24/26 – There are histories that disappear because no one bothered to preserve them, and others that disappear because the physical places that held them have been erased. Twilight Ladies, the striking short documentary from directors Alexe Liebert and Alain Soldeville, works against both kinds of disappearance, bringing a nearly vanished chapter of Singapore’s transgender history back into view.
Running just under 11 minutes, Twilight Ladies takes us to Bugis Street, where Singapore’s transgender community established a vibrant presence beginning in the 1950s. The area became internationally known for its nightlife, attracting sailors and tourists from around the world to a street sometimes described as the “Montmartre of Singapore.” By the early 1980s, redevelopment threatened, and ultimately transformed, the world that had flourished there.
What makes Twilight Ladies particularly compelling is the way it tells this history. Rather than relying on the familiar talking-head structure of a conventional documentary, the filmmakers build an intimate cinematic memory from Alain Soldeville’s photographs, edited by Liebert, with text and voice by Ava Gia Salamat. The result has the quality of a living photo album; faces, gestures and moments preserved long after the physical environment around them disappeared.
Soldeville has a personal connection to the material. During a two-year journey through Asia and Australia in the early 1980s, he photographed Bugis Street and the transgender community that had made it famous. Those images now carry an additional weight: they are not simply beautiful photographs of another time, but pieces of evidence that these women were there, that they created a community and that their lives deserve a place in the historical record.
There is glamour in these images, but the film doesn’t treat its subjects as curiosities from an exotic nightlife scene. That distinction matters. The women of Twilight Ladies emerge with personality, style and presence. The documentary asks us to look beyond the fascination that tourists may once have brought to Bugis Street and instead recognize the people who actually called this world their own.
The film is also quietly about what happens when a city “improves” itself by removing the communities that gave a neighborhood its identity. The destruction and redevelopment of Bugis Street becomes more than an urban-planning footnote. It raises a larger question that remains relevant today: When a neighborhood disappears, whose history disappears with it?
Liebert and Soldeville resist turning that history into an exclusively tragic one. There is loss here, certainly, but there is also beauty, sensuality, humor, visibility and survival. That quality has been recognized on the festival circuit: Twilight Ladies received a Special Mention at Queer Lisboa for its trans-feminist perspective and its non-fatalistic approach to lives affected by gentrification, and TLVFest also gave the film an Honorable Mention, noting its use of the photo-novel form to connect individual lives with a larger collective history.
I had hoped to add the directors’ voices directly to this piece. Alexe Liebert and Alain Soldeville graciously offered to speak with The Hollywood Times, but with their work and travel schedules, and mine, we unfortunately weren’t able to find an interview time that worked before publication. I would have especially liked to ask what it felt like to revisit these photographs decades later and transform them from a personal photographic record into a film being seen by contemporary LGBTQ+ audiences.
Even without that conversation, the images speak powerfully.
Twilight Ladies is short, but the history it opens up is much larger than its running time. It is a reminder of the importance of queer archives, and of photography itself as an act of preservation. Cities change. Buildings disappear. Communities are displaced. But an image can survive, waiting for someone to bring it back into the light.
And for eleven memorable minutes, the ladies of Bugis Street are visible again.
By Valerie Milano, The Hollywood Times
