After becoming the first Singaporean filmmaker to win Locarno’s Golden Leopard for A Land Imagined , Yeo Siew Hua will break new ground again with mystery thriller Stranger Eyes , which is the first Singapore film to premiere in-competition at the Venice Film Festival.
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The Singapore-Taiwan-France-U.S. co-production stars a Taiwanese ensemble cast featuring legendary actor-director Lee Kang-Sheng, Wu Chien-Ho, Annica Panna and Vera Chen. Malaysian actor Pete Teo and Singaporean actress Xenia Tan also appear in the film.
Yeo conceived the Stranger Eyes project more than 10 years ago but he and Akanga Film Asia’s veteran producer Fran Borgia hit several “dead ends” with funding.
“We decided that we were going to try something else and pitch different projects, so that’s how A Land Imagined came about,” Yeo told Deadline.
A Land Imagined , Yeo’s second feature, also went on to clinch Best Original Screenplay and Best Original Film Score at the Taipei Golden Horse Film Awards in 2019.
“After A Land Imagined garnered success, we decided to re-look at Stranger Eyes ,” said Yeo. Funding came a lot easier this time around and Yeo began workshopping Stranger Eyes at several labs from 2020 to 2022, including the Southeast Asia Fiction Film Lab, Produire au Sud and Nipkow Programm.
Besides Borgia, Stefano Centini (Volos Films), Jean-Laurent Csinidis (Films de Force Majeure) and Alex C. Lo (Cinema Inutile) also joined the project as producers.
Surveillance and image
Stranger Eyes follows a young couple who receives strange videos while investigating the mysterious disappearance of their baby daughter. They realize that someone has been filming their daily life, including their most intimate moments. The police sets up surveillance around their home to catch the voyeur, but tensions within the family rise as secrets unravel under the scrutiny of eyes watching them from all sides.
Revisiting Stranger Eyes after a decade, Yeo made significant re-writes to the film, especially to reflect how the discourse on surveillance has changed since the pandemic. Stranger Eyes was shot in both Singapore and Malaysia.
“We are already [in] sort of a surveillance state, but across the pandemic, something shifted. We stopped talking about encroachments on privacy to something different, to how self-surveillance is a moral responsibility during the pandemic,” said Yeo. “We’re no longer even questioning whether we are being watched. Instead, we’re talking about how to co-exist with being watched by the state, by big corporates and by each other.”
Yeo added that it was important that his film’s characters lived in Singapore’s public housing flats (referred to as ‘HDB flats’), ubiquitous across the island-state.
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“Something of this film came about through living in an HDB, an apartment where you are watching your neighbors constantly and your neighbors are probably watching back at you, and at the same time, knowing that the state is watching you watch someone else. There is this game of watching each other, and I was thinking about how I can translate this into film through a play of subjectivities and through the change of perspectives.”
The Singaporean director also pointed out that he was very interested in examining the role of images and “screens within screens” in the film as well.
“Cinema loves the voyeur, because we get glimpses into other people’s lives,” said Yeo. “I’ve been thinking about what being an image means in the time that we live in now, where we’re increasingly becoming images for others to see and where images have become such an important part of our own identities. The image has sort of become even more real than who we are sometimes.”
International collaborators
With TAICCA’s support, Yeo also managed to cast several top Taiwanese actors in Stranger Eyes , including Lee Kang-sheng, a mainstay in Tsai Ming-liang’s oeuvre of films for over 30 years.
Yeo said that Lee’s acting style was a perfect fit for the role of Lao Wu, a “silent voyeur” in Stranger Eyes. “Lee’s body of work has been very sparse in dialog, so he has a real mastery in his body language. He’s really good at using the power of his gaze and the way he moves,” said Yeo. “He is a very humble and quiet person and he really thinks about his role and his characters. He was spot on and there was not a moment that I was disappointed, in getting to work with with my heroes.”
Yeo also worked with French editor Jean-Christophe Bouzy, who worked on Palme d’Or-winner Titane , as well as sound editor Tu Duu-Chih.
Tu is well-known for his work on films by Tsai Ming-liang, Wong Kar-wai, Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien.
“He was involved in everybody’s films and still going, so it was very exciting for me to be able to work with someone with that kind of experience,” said Yeo. “When we’re talking about perspectives and subjectivities, you see it visually, but there is also a lot going on in the way we designed the sound to present this and bring out these elements.”
While Yeo acknowledge that it was exciting and refreshing to work with new international collaborators, he also made sure to continue working with several of his regular partners, including cinematographer Hideho Urata ( A Land Imagined , Japan’s Plan 75 ) as well as production designer James Page and costume designer Meredith Lee.
“It’s always great to work with new configurations of collaborators, but at the same time, I also made sure to work with some of my regulars. It was very comforting and grounding to work with the team that I was already familiar with.”
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