The first image from Singapore filmmaker Anthony Chen‘s “We Are All Strangers” might evoke the iconic wedding in the opening scene of Edward Yang’s Taiwanese drama “Yi Yi.” Both dramas from Asia offer a panorama of a family rocked by unexpected circumstances and grappling with the mundane realities of an economic life mismatched to their goals. While the connections are vast, it’s reductive to keep making comparisons, as the “Wet Season” and “Ilo Ilo” director’s fifth feature is its own big, beautiful beast of a movie. Watch an exclusive clip in the video above.
The first Singaporean film ever to play in competition at the Berlin Film Festival, Chen’s new drama features his perennial star Yeo Yann Yann as Bee Hwa, a beer waitress who marries into a single-fathered family. The patriarch, Boon Kiat (Andi Lim), runs a noodle stand while his son (Koh Jia Ler) is conscripted, so young, into the army — until a major life twist brings him back to the homestead, and with a new stepmother at the helm. The scene above offers a glimpse of Boon Kiat and Bee Hwa’s wedding, with cinematographer Teoh Gay Hian.
This is big, earnest, open-hearted cinema with a compassionate eye for its characters — even at their lowest moments, especially as “We Are All Strangers” takes a twist toward crime drama as legal issues mount for this new, found, patched-together family.
“We Are All Strangers” marks the third and last chapter of Anthony Chen’s “Growing Up” trilogy, following “Ilo Ilo” and “Wet Season.” All his films deal with the fragile dynamics within families, the class issues pressing upon them. The Singapore-born filmmaker took a hiatus from this trilogy to make the simmering love triangle drama “The Breaking Ice,” which played Cannes in 2023. Chen took on his sole for-hire English-language project so far with 2023’s “Drift,” starring Cynthia Erivo as a Liberian refugee grappling with her past on a remote Greek island.
“We Are All Strangers” premieres at the Berlin Film Festival on February 16; it’s currently seeking U.S. distribution. Watch the IndieWire-exclusive clip from the film above.
