In the ever-intensifying dance between seen and being seen, where surveillance has become both a threat and an intimate gesture, Singaporean filmmaker Yeo Siew Hua continues to push cinematic boundaries. Building on the Lynchian mystery of A Land Imagined, which won him the Golden Leopard at Locarno in 2018, Yeo returns with Stranger Eyes, a psychological thriller that explores the fraught terrain of voyeurism, digital identity, and intergenerational trauma.
The first Singaporean work to premiere in the Venice Film Festival’s Main Competition, Stranger Eyes follows a young father who, following his daughter’s disappearance, enters a tense spiral of suspicion and mediated intimacy. As anonymous home videos begin surfacing, all signs point to his reclusive neighbor, played with quiet intensity by the legendary Lee Kang-sheng. What unfolds is a hall-of-mirrors narrative that shifts perspectives and defies genre conventions, echoing Yeo’s fascination with fractured storytelling and the political and emotional implications of being seen.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Yeo during last year’s New York Film Festival; over the course of our conversation, he opened up about everything from casting Lee Kang-sheng as a “silent voyeur” to reimagining surveillance as a site of unexpected romance, to navigating his place within both Chinese-language cinema and Singapore’s evolving national film identity. What emerges is a portrait of an artist deeply engaged with the contradictions of the present and determined to reshape how and why we watch.
Ahead of Stranger Eyes‘ U.S. theatrical run beginning at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center on Friday, August 29, courtesy of Film Movement, enjoy the conversation below.
The Film Stage: I want to ask how you came up with this film. It’s obviously very much to do with the contemporary surveillance society, but at its core, it’s also a story about parenting and family.
Yeo Siew Hua: It’s just you said: we live in a very surveillant reality compared to before, where we were asking if we should live with more privacy and all these things. As time passed, there was a pandemic in-between me making the films and this kind of surveillant reality has become so real for us. Living in places like Singapore, where there’s a lot of surveillance, was just my lived experience: being in densely packed societies where we live right beside our neighbors and are able to look into their windows. So this idea of me looking at my neighbor and then knowing that someone is watching me watching someone else is kind of a whole chain of watching. I think this is definitely the starting concept of this film.
I’ve also been very interested in young parents; maybe it’s the age I am at. I’m also starting to think about parenthood and these things. I think the two came together in a story of a couple of young parents struggling with their parenthood while being watched.
It’s interesting in this film: on the one hand, you have people who are passively being under surveillance and watched; on the other, characters are actively showing themselves through social media and streaming. We even have one who explicitly stated that she wanted to be seen. How do you see this paradoxical situation?
Exactly. It’s like when I really start thinking about the idea of what it means to be watched. In a way it’s considered a violation of our privacy that we’re being watched. But at the same time, we want to be watched. Increasingly our existence is so tied up to being watched online and to being seen online that we want to be liked, followed, and subscribed-to. To exist is to be seen, more than ever before. It’s sort of an unprecedented moment that needs to be acknowledged and recognized.
What I’m trying to express is that the image of ourselves has become so real that it’s a bit more real than our actual persons––the images we show, you know. We are now living as an image for another. In this game of seeing and being seen, our image, in that sense, is more real than us. Because sometimes the image of ourselves actually presents to us facts that are not what we think of ourselves. And more and more I feel it creates these contradictions in our identity formation. Who we are and what we present ourselves as images for others sometimes overlaps and sometimes contradicts. We are becoming multiple persons of images. This is very interesting in the current moment that we live in now. It’s quite unprecedented, right? We have never been so intensely watched or watching other people. This has become sort of the centerpiece of what I was exploring in the film.
I want to circle back to the theme of families. The characters played by Wu Chien-ho and Lee Kang-sheng are both fathers and sons who live with their mothers. This dual identity creates an interesting dynamic within their families. What are your thoughts behind this character setting?
I think this kind of intergenerational story is very real in the way that we experience ourselves and our identities, particularly maybe in the Asian context where we are so tightly linked up with our families. It’s a famous adage to say that a lot of times in Singapore you live with your parents all the way until you live with your wife. Because rents are so expensive. People sometimes don’t even move out to live by themselves––they hop from one family unit to another––and sometimes, if they aren’t earning enough, even after they get married, they’re living with their parents. So it’s never a clear breakaway from these kinds of family lineages, and I think that’s exactly what I was trying to create in these two sorts of parallel families looking at each other.
But at the same time, when I create these links, both sides somehow seem to mirror each other in that way––these sort of mother-son-and-child relationships. It’s also a fact that how we are doing parenting is also how we have been parented, whether we rebel against it or whether we take on certain family traditions and customs. In telling a story about parenthood, it’s also a story about childhood or sonhood. It’s sort of the same story. And I was trying to tell this through both families, which at the end sort of mirrored each other.
Photo by Mettie Ostrowski, courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center/New York Film Festival
The Lee Kang-sheng character and the Wu Chien-ho character also mirror each other in a way that one is almost repeating the past of the other and is doomed to repeat the fate of the other. But you seem to give us an optimistic ending––it’s possible to break the cycle. Can you talk a bit more about the new generation of parents and people’s hesitation about having children?
I mean, I’m nobody to decide if people should or should not have kids. I only tried to question myself. At this moment, I’m thinking about starting my own family, and I sort of fantasize about the questions like: if I had had a chance to start a family much earlier in my life, would I have been a fuck-up? Would I have been a terrible parent? It’s a fantasy. It’s a thought.
In all honesty, I think the film also expresses that, in a way, you are never ready to be a parent. Even though I’m maybe a little older than before and maybe a little bit wiser than before. But still: nobody really prepares you for something like parenthood, right? I do think that we are a lot more aware of trying to be good and responsible parents now than before. In the past, our parents and older generation were like, “Let’s just try to have more kids. The more the merrier.” This kind of big-family, Asian-values kind of situation.
But the kids these days, the young people exactly, they are going through a very critical and existential moment of thinking, “Are having kids good for the environment? Are we capable enough to provide for our children?” Because we don’t want to be like how we were raised and how we were brought up. I feel like that kind of reflection is super-intense at this current moment. For me, it’s good; it’s good that people are thinking about it. The whole process of the film is in asking these questions. At least we’re not walking into it blind. I don’t have any say on whether people want or do not want to have kids but it’s important to reflect on it and not walk into it blindly, like many before us have.
Lee Kang-sheng is such a legendary actor and played a vital role in this movie. Why do you want to cast him in the first place? What’s it like to work with him?
Well, he has this kind of mastery of his body language because we know of his roles in the films of Tsai Ming-liang with very minimal dialogue. And he has this very powerful gaze. And I want to cast a voyeur––a silent type of voyeur. I needed someone with that kind of power in his eyes. Even when I was writing the script, the idea of him playing the role came about very, very easily for me.
And when I finally tried him out on-camera, it was really a no-brainer. The film maybe sets him up in the beginning as sort of a creepy voyeur, but that’s the thing with Lee Kang-sheng: once you spend the time to look at him, he brings so much of his humanity to the role. Even though he might be acting in ways that you might find “uncommon,” there is so much to relate to an actor like Lee Kang-sheng.
He is an amazing actor, but more importantly, he’s also really such a wonderful human being. It’s always a bit scary to work with your heroes. As you said: he’s such a legendary character. But I’m thankful that he is such a joy to work with. I think we were so in-sync that I didn’t have to impose my reading of the character or to change what he was presenting to me with the character. I accepted him for who he is. And I think that just came out in the character in the way that was perfect.
I want you to talk about the use of space in this film because I think the locations you picked to shoot the film also play very important roles, like the apartment complex and the shopping mall. They all feel very artificial and help create this kind of alienation. Why these particular spaces, and how did you find them?
These spaces that I was using in the film are very artificial, as we say. Whether it is the apartment, the shopping mall, or the Snow City, which is even more surreal. But in a way, these are very iconic spaces in Singapore. Singapore is constructed out of a very contrived or constructed reality. We’re talking about tourist attractions like the Snow City. But also, things like the shopping mall––which is the core of social life in Singapore because everybody is trying to avoid the heat of the sun––you can go from one shopping mall to another and spend a whole day mall-hopping and going through underpasses below the city, so you never need to see the light of day. It’s really how the local Singaporeans congregate for their social life, just as well as these tourist attractions and the parks.
These are core places for local Singaporeans. I really wanted to construct a film that was everyday and very mundane. I didn’t want to construct hyper-realistic spaces. Because this story is about everyday, but also being watched. That’s maybe what’s getting you under the skin: you are being watched every day.
What’s interesting was the process of finding the specific apartment complex and shopping mall. They seem to be simple and everyday locations, but––for example––looking for the right apartments was really tricky. We needed to find two apartments that would be able to look into each other at the exact right height. Any higher or lower, you’re not going to get the right angle. And these two apartments have to be the right size for us to be able to shoot, also. But more importantly, the families will need to be willing to move out for two weeks and be housed in a hotel so that we can shoot undisturbed. At first I thought it was a simple task: that I just needed an apartment, a park, and a shopping mall. It turned out to be a lot trickier than what it seems on paper to get it to be exactly right. And thankfully I had a really amazing team that found these locations for us.
You mentioned Rear Window as one of the inspirations for the film. But it also reminds me of another Hitchcock masterpiece, Psycho, when you shift the narrative completely halfway into the film. I think that it’s still a very risky thing to do, even 64 years later. Why do you decide to tell the story this way?
This is something that I’ve already been exploring with all my films, actually. From A Land Imagined even to my very first film In the House of Straws, which is not widely seen because it had a short festival run and didn’t really have a commercial release. But I’ve always been very interested in exploring not only genre but storytelling. Many commentators have said, rightly so, that my film is a little bit of a shapeshifter. Engaging in the codes of genres and how to subvert them and also playing around with time and storytelling is always a conversation with cinema itself. I can only play with all of these things because it is a tradition that came before me; I’m sort of appropriating that to give it a new twist.
Of course this plays with certain expectations with the audience. I want my film to make you see with new eyes. It’s also to look at something deeper and realize that maybe something is more than what it seems, right? When you look into it deeper, things change. However you want to call this, shapeshifting or genre-bending, it’s part of that process of playing around with certain expectations.
The scene at the grocery store, where two characters dance along with the song by Tsai Chin while one looks at another through the surveillance, is a very unusually romantic scene; I never would have expected you could make a surveillance camera romantic. How did you come up with this scene?
I think it started from the idea I was saying, that none of our relationships now are unmediated. Or to put it another way: all our relationships now are through mediation. If you really think about it, that’s crazy. I mean, it’s crazy but also taken as a fact, right? Even speaking to my parents these days, I’m video-calling them.
And especially with romantic relationships now: if you’re not on an app, you’re probably not dating. It’s almost as clear-cut as that. I took this idea and extrapolated it and pushed it to the furthest end. And I realize there is actually something very romantic about this. It’s seeing but not touching and intimacy but never being able to share the same space.
But at the same time, how real is that? That’s the reality that I lived in. I had a long-distance relationship for a long time and that was also my reality. I understand it’s a really creepy idea, but there is something very romantic about being watched. This needs to be seen and recognized, I think. To give space and give attention to looking at someone is a really big romantic act.
The idea here is whether the looking is sincere or if it is with ulterior intention. As the characters expressed in the film, she was saying that he was just looking at me for who I am, not just being a mom or a DJ. He just wants to see me for who I am. And I think that has become a very romantic notion; I think all of that sort of culminated in that scene in the supermarket.
I also find it very interesting that the whole film is centered around the concept of seeing and being seen. However, during the big reveal towards the end of the film, you chose to let Lee Kang-sheng express it through his voice alone. Why do you make this pivot from visual to audio?
Actually, the audio space in the film is also really important. It’s a very quiet film, and when it’s really quiet what happens is: you see more. This is something that we all know and take as a fact. But at the same time, when it’s really quiet and you suddenly hear something, you really pay attention to it. And I think this is what culminates at the end. It’s a movie that doesn’t really soak into a lot of dialogue, but when, finally, we hear him speak––the voyeur who has been remaining very silent––you finally understand who he is.
That final dialogue, it’s as though he has been spending all his time watching; he has never really expressed himself until we hear him at the end. That becomes a moment that’s really powerful because he disappears for the final act of the film. He disappears into the gaze. He just becomes the gaze, and he returns as the video on the DVD and we hear his voice. That’s sort of him leaving the physical presence and floating into a certain ether or spiritual level that we only hear him through the voiceover.
You talked about inheriting and appropriating the cinema tradition of genres in your film. But you are also working within the bigger tradition of Chinese-language cinema (like casting Lee Kang-sheng) and you won the Golden Leopard at Locarno from a jury headed by Jia Zhangke. How do you see yourself in the tradition of Chinese-language cinema? On the other hand: this is also the first-ever Singaporean title placed in the Main Competition at the Venice Film Festival. How do you see yourself in the very young Singaporean cinema?
Maybe it’s more fair for me to talk about my contacts in the Singapore tradition, because it’s hard for me to situate myself in the larger Chinese-language cinema history which goes way beyond me and before me. It’s really hard to say.
Of course, being a Chinese-language film, it has that connection with the larger Chinese-language-cinema tradition. It’s putting forth new proposals, because I think we have arrived at a point where people have an idea of what Chinese-language cinema is, at least from the West. I’m saying, “No, no, wait, if you think that’s it, then cinema is dead. I’m going to take this tradition and I’m going to make some new proposals from my own voice as a filmmaker. And let’s see how it adds to that larger conversation of Chinese-language cinema traditions.” Right?
In Singapore, the case is that we’re a lot smaller. We’re very young. Our cinema history is very young. Of course, we also had a much richer cinema tradition that came out of the Malay cinema in Singapore when we were part of Malaysia or the Malayan Federation. But there was sort of a break-away from that in the ’80s and ’90s.
I also understand that my film being in the Chinese language situated itself slightly differently. But I still consider my films more Southeast Asian and part of that Southeast Asian cinema tradition. It’s maybe more singular in its influences from Chinese-language cinema, whereas so much of my cinema is influenced from Southeast Asia, from people like Apichatpong [Weerasethakul], Lav Diaz, and Tran Anh Hung. These are all really important filmmakers I look up to from my formative years. And they have all, in some ways, made it into my cinema just as well as people like Edward Yang, Jia Zhangke, Stanley Kwan, and Johnnie To. I’m in a larger amalgamation of that context. Coming out of this very young cinema history of Singapore, I hope to bring some interesting proposals to what cinema can be from where I come from.
Based on what you just said, do you feel any pressure to bring a representation of Singapore to the cinema?
I think the context of Singapore being so small and still being in the process of searching for its own identity puts some pressure on people like us, the artists and filmmakers, with how our works relate to the Singapore context. But actually, in a conscious way, I try to not get sucked into that too much. Because it’s almost like a nationalistic discussion which is detrimental to cinema. What has to come out, in its most sincere sense, is that it is my cinema. And I just happen to be coming out of that context. If I am sincere about my cinema, then whatever that is “Singapore” of me comes out naturally instead of me trying to impose or contrive or force some kind of idealized national agenda or identity onto my own cinema. I resist that because I think that actually represents it wrongly. I think that would misrepresent what is an organic, evolving, and very lively discussion about culture.
I think this mentality is also represented in your very international production team with actors from Taiwan and a French editor.
My DoP is Japanese. My producer is from Spain. My art director is from the UK. Although all of them have had a long period of living in Singapore. And maybe that’s one truth of my film as a Singaporean film, which is that Singapore is very cosmopolitan, right? Singapore is a really mixed, kind of melting pot of cultures and ideas. And that is really the advantage of a Singaporean film.
And as I was just saying: my influences are so widespread from the region. My Singapore identity is how interesting all these mixes come together. As a Singaporean, I really believe in the power of the co-productions. It’s maybe the only way I am able to make a film as a Singaporean, because our market is so small. Without co-production, we are just unable to make a film. This is not the same situation as other countries that are able to sustain their cinema through their own domestic revenue and are able to fund their films. In Singapore, that is just not a possibility. Being international and cosmopolitan about my films is the very condition of the possibility of a film being made in the first place. And I think that itself might be the Singapore identity for me.
Stranger Eyes opens at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center on Friday, August 29 and will expand.
The post “We Want to Be Watched”: Stranger Eyes Director Yeo Siew Hua on Voyeurism, Lee Kang-sheng, and Singaporean Cinema Identity first appeared on The Film Stage.
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