The three-city West Coast tour features Q&As with Annette Lee and a San Francisco mixer celebrating Singaporean food, arts and entrepreneurship.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, UNITED STATES, October 29, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — SingaporeConnect, the Bay Area’s grassroots community led by Singaporean tech industry veteran Mark Sin and friends, will bring Dream Stall, the Singapore feature film by Annette Lee, to three U.S. West Coast cities on November 14–16, 2026. Lee, the film’s director and lead actress, joins every screening for a post-screening Q&A dialogue with the audience.
Presented by Eight Parables and co-hosted by SingaporeConnect, the U.S. West Coast tour opens in Los Angeles’ NoHo Arts District on Saturday, November 14, anchors in San Francisco’s Japantown Cultural District on Sunday, November 15, with a post-screening Arts & Entrepreneurship mixer, and closes in the greater Seattle area on Monday, November 16.
The tour is held in support of “Spice & Story” by Kampong Collective, a Southeast Asian 501(c)(3) nonprofit that creates spaces for connection across cultures and generations.
About the film and the film director. Dream Stall is an English-and-Mandarin feature set in Singapore: a prodigal daughter, caught between grief and glamour, saves her family’s hawker stall against her father’s wishes, and learns what social-media fame and success are worth to her. It is Annette Lee’s directorial debut, and the tour follows the film’s theatrical release in Singapore and Malaysia. Annette is a Singaporean singer-songwriter, filmmaker, comedian-digital creator. From YouTube, TikTok, Instagram to a warm and candid feature film crafted with love for both social media natives and classic cinephiles, Annette joins the new Hollywood digital creators-to-film directors wave with the theatrical release of her first feature.
> MEDIA EXCLUSIVE DREAM STALL’S GLOBAL TRAILER HERE.
> WATCH ANNETTE LEE’S INSTAGRAM ANNOUNCEMENT HERE.
The Tech-Arts Synergy. The tour is itself the story: a Singapore film brought to the U.S. West Coast by Singapore’s technology and creative diaspora, hosted and funded by people who build products by day. “Singapore’s technology diaspora is backing Singapore’s storytellers,” said Mark Sin, President of SingaporeConnect and a former Apple hardware engineering lead of two decades. “We’ve built global products here for years. It’s time we help build global audiences for Singapore and Southeast Asian films too.”
“Singapore is a small country with a big heart,” added Mark Sin. “Last year 3,300 people came to the first Singapore Festival in North America, most of them not Singaporean. This tour is the next step: bringing a Singapore story, and the people who made it, to the communities here, and showing that Singapore’s community abroad is a bridge, not an outpost.”
“Candidly, I am a very selective funder. I wanted to bring to global audiences an updated view of Singapore that is more true to contemporary Singaporeans’ sense of humor and struggles as a society. I reached out to Annette as it was her debut as a Director and I found her previous works had creatively juxtaposed these qualities,”, said Yik Lin Khoo, a Singapore-based enterprise strategist, who had his start in tech and national ICT policy.
Mark and Yik Lin met as co-founders of the Singapore Students’ Association at Carnegie Mellon during their college years. Backing Dream Stall is their first joint endeavor as long-time friends and supporters of the arts.
When “Crazy Rich Asians” first made global headlines back in 2018, Singaporeans knew the film, set in Singapore, was far from the fullest story of Singapore.
“Our richest story is in our deep community kinship. The ‘kampong spirit’ or village that shows up for each other,” said Jan Lin Lee, Eight Parables Executive Producer. “This tour is our story to a world grappling with increasing isolation and to elevate authentic Southeast Asian stories.”
“We see both the AI disruption in film and the catalytic moment for digital-native filmmakers to build a healthy bridge between tech and the arts, one that preserves human soul at the center. Dream Stall checks the boxes for us to pilot a feature film tour with”, added Jan Lin Lee, who came from two decades in social impact, scaling digital communities in sports, and producing premium films for the OTT Olympics.com, before founding her film incubator, Eight Parables.
The Arts & Entrepreneurship Mixer. After the San Francisco film screening, the tour continues with a post-screening SingaporeConnect Arts & Entrepreneurship Mixer: a Bak Kut Teh pop-up by Dabao Singapore. Bak Kut Teh is a popular Southeast Asian comfort food where tender pork ribs are slow-simmered in a rich, savory broth. Not on Dabao’s regular menu, served in honor of the film’s hawker-stall story, and a conversation on creative entrepreneurship with Annette Lee and Dabao founder Emily Lim (Food Network alum, James Beard Award semifinalist, Chopped champion), hosted by Bay Area content creator and ex-Googler Joanna Hope Lai.
“Dream Stall hits close to home for anyone who has built a food business from scratch. Running a hawker stall is never just business. It’s cultural preservation, keeping recipes and traditions alive so they’re passed on and not lost,” said Emily Lim. “Bak Kut Teh got me through those cold, homesick winters in San Francisco. That feeling is why I started Dabao Singapore. Serving Bak Kut Teh after the film is my way of welcoming everyone to the table.”
The mixer is a separate ticket, with a bundle price for screening-and-mixer.
Tickets Pre-Registration. To learn more about the tour program and to pre-register for the screenings, please do so at singaporeconnect.org/dream-stall. Pre-registrants receive priority to purchase the tickets when sales open, as we anticipate demand to exceed capacity.
Mark Sin
SingaporeConnect
+1 408-601-0310
media@singaporeconnect.org
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Dream Stall International Trailer
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