Singapura Canal+ series expatriate life in Singapore, Digi Mart USA News (Singapore): Whether in Paris metro corridors or on social media, the new Canal+ series Singapura is hard to miss. Its promotional posters show three faces marked by suspicion and despair, set against lush vegetation and distant buildings, under the enigmatic tagline “Hell exists in paradise too.”
The French fiction, released on MyCanal in early November, is set in Singapore within a luxury residential complex where several families of French expatriates live alongside their many maids, or domestic employees. Journalist Justine, played by Nailia Harzoune, is transferred there for work with her partner and his daughter.
She discovers a superficial world built on pretense, and everything changes when her new friend Elisa, played by Ariane Labed, disappears mysteriously.
The series is loosely adapted from the novel L’expatriée, published by Gallimard in 2013, a thriller centered on a French woman in Singapore. Its author and screenwriter, Elsa Marpeau, lived in Singapore intermittently for ten years, including two full years.
She recalled her arrival at a condominium and being bombarded with personal questions by other expatriate women, a memory that inspired her to set fiction in this closed community where boredom and gossip spread quickly.
Marpeau described how, in such a community, “everyone sees everything, all the time,” recounting an incident in which she entered the wrong apartment and was asked about it within minutes. The series blends thriller codes with a setting that critics might compare to The White Lotus and Desperate Housewives, with a strong sense of oppression.
The fiction also depicts unsettling relationships of domination and power, particularly toward the maids, mostly Filipino women in the series, who manage cooking, housekeeping and children for expatriates. They are paid very little and sometimes live in inhumane conditions.
Marpeau said that, although the portrayal may seem exaggerated, the scenes reflect things she witnessed, including dogs sleeping on a bed while a maid slept on the floor.
Although Singapore is described by the creator as a central character, very few scenes were actually filmed there because filming is heavily restricted by censorship. The production shot for a month in Thailand, particularly Bangkok, and spent three days in Singapore.
Actress Nailia Harzoune said the city’s atmosphere felt highly anxious, noting that one cannot even chew gum there. The series opens with a taxi driver telling Justine that suicide is not permitted, recounting a maid who jumped from a 12th-floor building the previous year, survived, and was then prosecuted.
