Sanct, the Singapore-registered social app for close friends and family, released Episode 5 of its short film series on YouTube on Thursday 1 October at 5pm Singapore time, three days after the app went live on the App Store in Singapore on Monday 28 September. Titled “Welcome home.”, the film is set on 1 October, the day it was released: Keisha, the daughter who works in Singapore, flies home to Jakarta on her father’s birthday without telling him. Every app screen in the film is real, including an event in the family chat, a message burned by its sender, a moment shared with selected friends, a live location that runs for 30 minutes, the Dual camera and a Carousel of five photos. The app is free and has no ads, and 5,000 people are already on the platform.
SINGAPORE – At 4.52pm in Jakarta, a message arrives in a group chat of three people. The chat is named “Surprise”. The message reads: “I took the earlier flight. Just landed. Don’t tell Papa.” The sender is Keisha, who works in Singapore. Her mother and her sister read it. Then Keisha presses on her own message and chooses “Burn for everyone”, and on her sister’s phone the words change to “This message was burned”.
That is how a secret is kept in “Welcome home.”, the fifth film in Sanct’s series about a family living an hour’s flight apart. The Singapore-registered start-up released it on YouTube on Thursday 1 October at 5pm Singapore time, three days after its app went live on the App Store in Singapore on Monday 28 September, and one day after it arrived in Indonesia and Malaysia. The film runs for 1 minute 51 seconds and has no spoken lines. Its story is set on 1 October, the same day it came out.
The 12th, or today
The day in the film starts in the family chat. An event card reads “Papa’s birthday”, “Dinner at home”, 7pm to 9pm. At 7.41am Keisha writes: “Happy birthday, Papa. See you on the 12th.” In Episode 4 she had booked her ticket home for 12 October. Her father answers one minute later: “I will wait for you.” He expects to wait 11 more days.
At 4.10pm her sister Clarissa sets four plates on the dinner table and takes a photo. She shares it with the caption “Four plates tonight.” and chooses who can see it: her sister, her mother and two close friends. Her father’s name is left unticked.
From the back seat of a car, Keisha shares her live location with two people and two words: “Almost home.” Clarissa opens the map three times, at 5.54pm, 6.01pm and 6.05pm, and each time her sister’s picture is closer to their street. Their father sits at the dinner table with a book. Then the doorbell rings, and he opens the door himself.
Nobody speaks at the door. Clarissa takes a photo of the hug with the Dual camera, so her own face is in the corner of the picture. After the birthday dinner she posts five photos as one Carousel, “All four of us.”, and this time her father’s name is ticked. In the family’s last scene, Keisha turns her phone face down on the table and looks at her parents and her sister. The film closes on Sancty, the small companion inside the app, carrying a white gift box, and one line on screen: “Welcome home, Keisha.”
What is real in the film
Every app screen in the film comes from the Sanct app as it is today, rebuilt only for the characters’ names, photos, messages and times. An event in a chat carries a title, a date, a start and end time and an “Add to Calendar” button. A message can be burned by the person who sent it: a long press, “Burn message”, then “Burn for me” or “Burn for everyone”. No message in the film disappears by itself. Every moment has an audience the user chooses: all friends, selected friends, or only themselves. A live location is shared as a moment for 30 minutes, and then it stops automatically. The Dual camera takes a picture with the back and front cameras in one moment, and a Carousel holds five photos.
“For four episodes this family met on a screen. In this one the app does less. It keeps a secret for one afternoon, and it tells two people that she is nearly home,” said Mr Sion Abednego, founder of Sanct. “The last thing Keisha does is put her phone face down on the table, because the people she missed are in the room. We set the story on 1 October on purpose, so that anyone who watches it that day is in the same day as the family.”
How user data is handled
Sanct has no ads and no public feed, and it does not sell user data to third parties. Sancty processes data only inside the user’s own account in order to respond, and this data is not used to train public AI models. Sanct’s privacy policy is published at https://sanctsocial.app/privacy
Price and availability
Sanct is free: core features stay free, and optional premium features will follow, with no ads in either. It has been available for iPhone on the App Store in Singapore since Monday 28 September, and in Indonesia and Malaysia since Wednesday 30 September. The Android version on Google Play is not ready yet. The app is available in English, Bahasa Melayu, Bahasa Indonesia and Hindi, and 5,000 people are already on the platform.
On Sanct, first friends are added by meeting in person and scanning each other’s QR code. Search and friend suggestions open after five friends, and they reach friends of friends. All five episodes of the film series are on YouTube.
Sanct can be downloaded through https://sanct.social
This press release has also been published on VRITIMES
