Some stories live in glass cases. Some live in the memory of a grandparent, a kiln, a bowl, a shophouse street that no longer exists. On 7 July 2026, at the Stories Unearthed: WAN AI Video Challenge Awards Ceremony, we watched a room full of people take those stories out of the case β and put them on screen.
Fooyo was proud to partner Alibaba Cloud Singapore and HeritageSG on this challenge, and prouder still of what the community made of it. Congratulations to every winner, finalist and participant.
Heritage, retold
The brief was deceptively simple: reimagine Singapore’s heritage as a short film. What came back was anything but simple. Entrants dug into maritime trade routes and museum labels, into porcelain kilns and family roots, into the objects that outlive the people who held them. Several creators told us the hardest part wasn’t the technology β it was the research. They spoke to relatives. They read archival material. They went looking for the story first, and reached for the tools second.
That is exactly the point. Heritage isn’t preserved by being locked away; it’s preserved by being retold, in whatever medium the next generation actually watches. Working alongside HeritageSG, this challenge set out to put Singapore’s heritage in front of a new audience β and to prove that a first-time filmmaker with a laptop can now carry a story that once needed a full production crew.
The winning films
π₯ First Place β The Museum Label Was Too Small, by Gwendelyn Lee
A cinematic short on heritage, memory and maritime trade β built around the quiet idea that the little card beside an artefact never tells you the whole story.
π₯ Second Place β The Roots, by Krystyna Wen
A meditation on lineage and belonging, and on what gets carried forward when a family moves but its roots don’t.
π₯ Third Place β Jingdezhen Kiln, by Connie
Fire, clay and craft. A tribute to the porcelain tradition whose wares travelled the trade routes into this region β and into our kitchens.
Honourable mentions
Three more films the judges couldn’t let pass without recognition.
The Lost Relic, by prakhere
Echoes of the City: The Collector’s Legacy, by Irene
The Bowl That Remembers, by Aaryan Kandiah
Watch them all
All six films are collected in one playlist: Stories Unearthed β WAN AI Video Challenge winners playlist. Set aside twenty minutes; they’re worth watching end to end.
You can read more about the challenge itself on the official Stories Unearthed campaign page. The films were produced using Alibaba Cloud’s WAN video generation model, part of the Qwen family β the tooling that made it possible for a solo creator to hold a whole production in their hands.
Thank you
Our thanks to Alibaba Cloud Singapore for making the challenge happen, to HeritageSG for keeping the heritage at the heart of it, to the judges for the difficult afternoon we gave them, and above all to every participant who chose to spend their evenings excavating a story rather than scrolling past one.
Singapore’s heritage doesn’t belong in storage. It belongs in circulation β and after 7 July, six more stories are back out in the world.
#StoriesUnearthed #AlibabaCloudSG #HeritageSG #Fooyo #GenAI #SingaporeHeritage
