Plot
After a fall-out with her recent boyfriend Ethan (Bobby Tonelli), Ali (Tan Kheng Hua) a single mother finds herself broke, desperate and homeless. In an effort to care for her blind son Jonah (Dickson Tan), she reluctantly seeks out the only living relative she knows, her father Tan (Mako Iwamatsu). To earn enough money to be on her own she accepts a job in her father's bird shop, but not without the resistance of the shop's manager Liz (Zelda Rubinstein), a manipulative and protective middle-aged British woman.
While Liz and Ali clash at every glance, Tan begins to bond with his new grandson, teaching him about the beauty of Singapore's traditional songbird culture.
For the first time, Jonah crawls out of his shell and finds a connection with the outside world, drawing him further from his mother's hold, and deeper into Tan's world. Ali's soon finds herself caught in a double-edged scenario, as she realizes her father has a powerful and profound effect on her son.
After great deliberation, Ali decides to let Tan and Jonah bond, but just as she feared, Tan mysteriously becomes cold and distant. As a result, Ali's feelings of childhood rejection resurface, sending her into a quest for the truth of their past.
But the truth is not always easy to face, as her father's explanation of why he left the family is revealed; a dark secret of 20 years past is exposed, changing Ali's view on life forever.
Read more about this topic: Cages
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)