This Land Is Mine

It is actually based on the novel 'The Devil's Circle', and also inspired by real events. Post-WWII Singapore is seldom depicted on screen, and so this is something refreshing.

Far from more just a retelling of history, it is also on real lives upended by the ending of the war, and how it is still playing out in peace time, and the constant question of identity.

Even if it may seemed that there are different stories being told, it was to be all interwoven towards the climax.

It is actually very gripping and twists and turns where one may not expect.

I'm pretty lucky to be captioning this for broadcast on Canadian television. I probably would never have tuned into it otherwise.

But the further I get into it, the more engrossed I am in this fascinating story about post-war Singapore.

For those who are as ignorant as I am, Singapore was a British colony soon occupied by Japan during the WWII. There were legendary clashes, all kinds of oppressive violence.

The Chinese, Malays, Tamil, and British all made Singapore an amazing place, but this is fraught with post-occupation anger against the Japanese, and two of our key protagonists are lawyers employed by a law firm tasked with giving a defense to a Japanese officer on trial for war crimes, with death hanging in the balance as the consequence of losing the trial.

The series begins with the assigning of the law case, and it develops around that and so much more.

The cast is not of all British actors but instead people who are actually from the places they're supposed to be from - China, India, Singapore, Malaysia, and the UK.

It's a heady swirl of cultures and clashes and colonialism and war crimes, plus the fight between the modern way of a younger generation against the traditions of old.

It's something different from your usual fare on war history re WWII, and there's a lot to like here. I highly recommend it.