Seeing and being seen in Venice’s first Singapore film

Director Yeo Siew Hua said his latest thriller was all about ‘looking and being seen’ – Copyright AFP/File Mahmud HAMS

Jordi ZAMORA

Singapore’s first film in the Venice Festival’s main competition, Yeo Siew Hua’s “Stranger Eyes”, is a complex reflection on voyeurism, surveillance and fractured visions of people’s lives. 

The director — winner of a best film award at the 2018 Locarno Film Festival for “A Land Imagined” about poor immigrants in Singapore — said his latest thriller has a “number of layers, all in relation to looking and being seen”. 

“We never get a real whole picture,” Yeo said, rather “a pastiche of perspectives, of points of view.” 

“Maybe we’re just used to scrolling these days, instead of looking to see someone intently, sincerely. And maybe we should,” he told a press conference ahead of the film’s world premiere on Thursday. 

The prestigious festival on the swanky Lido is poised to award its Golden Lion for best film on Saturday to one of 21 contenders, among them “Stranger Eyes.” 

The film begins with the disappearance of a toddler in broad daylight in a Singapore park. 

Her parents, a young couple, fruitlessly search for her with the help of the grandmother who lives with them — before one day mysterious DVDs appear under their door, with recordings of the whole family in their apartment in happier times. 

Although the police close in on the voyeur spying on them, the truth is more complex than it seems.  

“Stranger Eyes” stars two well-known Taiwanese actors, Anicca Panna and Wu Chien-Ho. 

As they search desperately for clues about the disappearance of their daughter, they soon realise they have a tool that is also a trap —  surveillance cameras.

– ‘Someone is watching me’ –

“I guess in a very simple way I take my inspirations from my everyday life, living in Singapore, which is quite a densely populated city,” the director said. 

Yeo explained how in the city’s high-rise apartments “when I open my window I see my neighbours, I know all their routines, I assume they know mine”. 

Like in other Asian countries, Singapore is also covered with surveillance cameras, said the director, noting that “it doesn’t take 15 minutes walking anywhere and you will notice surveillance cameras”. 

“It’s like someone is watching me, watching someone else,” said Yeo, adding that “seeing and being seen really is part of my reality.”

The film also addresses the difficulty of living in close quarters in an apartment as a family, with parents, or grandparents. 

“Particularly in Asia… we live in the same apartment, and strangely, we are very separated from each other,” Yeo said. 

“And I think a lot of what happens in this movie comes from this internal drama.”