The primary picture from Singapore filmmaker Anthony Chen‘s “We Are All Strangers” may evoke the long-lasting marriage ceremony within the opening scene of Edward Yang’s Taiwanese drama “Yi Yi.” Each dramas from Asia supply a panorama of a household rocked by surprising circumstances and grappling with the mundane realities of an financial life mismatched to their objectives. Whereas the connections are huge, it’s reductive to maintain making comparisons, because the “Moist Season” and “Ilo Ilo” director’s fifth function is its personal massive, lovely beast of a film. Watch an unique clip within the video above.
The primary Singaporean movie ever to play in competitors on the Berlin Movie CompetitionChen’s new drama options his perennial star Yeo Yann Yann as Bee Hwa, a beer waitress who marries right into a single-fathered household. The patriarch, Boon Kiat (Andi Lim), runs a noodle stand whereas his son (Koh Jia Ler) is conscripted, so younger, into the military — till a significant life twist brings him again to the homestead, and with a brand new stepmother on the helm. The scene above provides a glimpse of Boon Kiat and Bee Hwa’s marriage ceremony, with cinematographer Teoh Homosexual Hian.
That is massive, earnest, open-hearted cinema with a compassionate eye for its characters — even at their lowest moments, particularly as “We Are All Strangers” takes a twist towards crime drama as authorized points mount for this new, discovered, patched-together household.
“We Are All Strangers” marks the third and final chapter of Anthony Chen’s “Rising Up” trilogy, following “Ilo Ilo” and “Moist Season.” All his movies take care of the delicate dynamics inside households, the category points urgent upon them. The Singapore-born filmmaker took a hiatus from this trilogy to make the simmering love triangle drama “The Breaking Ice,” which performed Cannes in 2023. Chen took on his sole for-hire English-language venture to date with 2023’s “Drift,” starring Cynthia Erivo as a Liberian refugee grappling along with her previous on a distant Greek island.
“We Are All Strangers” premieres on the Berlin Movie Competition on February 16; it’s at the moment searching for U.S. distribution. Watch the IndieWire-exclusive clip from the movie above.
