A Singaporean man mixes up two memories: one of a colonial-era propaganda film about communist insurgencies in rubber plantations, and another of his Malaysian ex-playmate.

‘Emergencies’ dwells in the memories of multiple entities – those of European planters, Southeast Asian coolies, communist terrorists, suspects of being communist terrorists, modern day rubber fetishists, the land transformed for agricultural purposes, and the Western studio films made there – tuning into the tensions that emerge from their ambiguous and sometimes contradictory interactions.