Producers of Separation: Declassified reveal what it took to retell Singapore’s split with Malaysia

Such telegrams “were never really meant for the public eye when they were written, essentially”, noted producer Clarisse Goh. “It’s almost gossipy.”

Six decades later, those documents take centre stage in CNA’s two-part documentary, Separation: Declassified, which premiered this week.

“So much of history is presented through documents that have, in a way, been through a kind of filter,” said Mark Frost, co-author of Singapore: A Biography. “You get public speeches, you get official documents, carefully formulated to record events.

“Here you get these telegrams, confidential correspondence, which are all without that filter.”

But that is only one part of the documentary, shared the producers as they opened up on what went into its making.

WATCH PART 1: Secrets, betrayals — How Singapore’s split with Malaysia was engineered (46:59)