Yeo Siew Hua, director of Stranger Eyes: ‘We have replaced looking at other people with scrolling on a screen’

• In ‘Stranger Eyes’, the filmmaker poses a reflection, open to multiple interpretations, on looking and being observed

Valladolid, 21 October 2024. Yeo Siew Hua, the Singaporean filmmaker who won an Espiga in 2018 with his debut film A Land Imagined, has returned to SEMINCI to defend his second film as director in the Official Section, Stranger Eyes, the first Singaporean film to participate in competition at the Venice Film Festival. A metaphor open to interpretations about the social surveillance we live under, inspired by the density of the population grouped in high-rise flat buildings in Singapore, where everyone sees their neighbours, your neighbours look at you and there are cameras in the streets. ‘In Singapore you never forget that the state is watching you’.

As the director explained in his presentation at the 69th edition of the Valladolid International Film Festival (SEMINCI), Stranger Eyes is a film about perspectives and subjectivity, with different angles and multiple layers. The protagonists, a young married couple whose two-year-old daughter has been missing for several months, begin to give up until they receive some videos and realise that someone has been filming them in their daily lives.

‘When I was making it, it was very clear to me that this film was about watching, so much so that it could have been a silent film,’ he admitted. ‘In fact, if you remove all the dialogue, the film still works. You can fill in the gaps with how you want to construct the story, because seeing is not seeing everything; you always see through a perspective, through what you are allowed to see or not allowed to see.’

For Yeo Siew Hua, parenthood or relationships today are mediated by images. ‘I think what is happening in our lives is that we have replaced looking at people with scrolling through screens, so we don’t actually see,’ he noted. ‘When you really look at a person you lose yourself in the act of looking. It happens to me that I start to imitate their gestures; I think because the act of looking is not a passive act, it is transformative.’

One of the key characters in the film is the voyeur played by Lee Kang-sheng (The Hole, Stray Dogs), an icon of the cinema of Tsai Ming-liang (The Wayward Cloud), one of the best-known film directors of the Second Wave of Taiwanese cinema. The strength of his gaze and body language is such that the filmmaker has acknowledged that when the actor first stepped in front of the camera, he fell in love with the character in a way he did not foresee. ‘It changed the way we shot the film, because it was decided that it would be his gaze that would lead. When you have a great actor like him, it changes the game, it changes the whole film.’

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