Anthony Chen: A triumphant 2023
Singapore’s best filmmaker breaks through internationally with two features shot in Greece and China
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Helmi Yusof
THIS YEAR WAS A BANNER YEAR for Singapore filmmaker Anthony Chen. He had not one, but two, feature films debut at prestigious festivals – a feat by any industry standard.
The first, Drift, was his first English-language production and starred 2020 Oscar nominee for Best Actress, Cynthia Erivo. The second, The Breaking Ice, was Chen’s first mainland Chinese feature and starred three of the most sought-after young actors in China: Zhou Dongyu, Liu Haoran and Qu Chuxiao.
Drift debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January, and The Breaking Ice premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Both received glowing reviews from influential publications such as Hollywood Reporter and Variety, the latter describing Chen’s signature style as “graceful, lucid classicism, a mode that in its straightforward sincerity is not fashionable in our abrasive moment”.
For the past few weeks, Chen has been busy promoting his films in various cities, so trying to schedule an interview was challenging. But he finally found some breathing space for a Zoom call from Taipei, where he was serving as a jury member at the Golden Horse Awards, headed by three-time Oscar winner Lee Ang.
Chen says: “Lee Ang has long been an inspiration for me. He was the person who chaired the same jury in 2013, which awarded four Golden Horse Awards to my first feature Ilo Ilo, including Best Film and Best New Director. It changed my life… Now, 10 years later, I’m on the jury with him, watching 43 films over 11 days – four films a day.
“As a mark of his humility, he’s always asking the rest of the jury for our honest opinions, going so far as to sometimes admit he doesn’t fully understand what he just saw… Can you imagine Lee Ang telling you he doesn’t understand a film?”
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Crying on set
It’s not surprising Chen counts Lee as an inspiration. In many ways, one can trace a direct artistic lineage from Lee’s early Mandarin films such as Pushing Hands (1991) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) to Chen’s subtle and restrained method of filmmaking.
Chen says: “I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller who focuses on the small moments – the soft gaze, the quiet nod, the turn of the head, that says so much more about the characters and their lives instead of the broad strokes of some blockbuster film… I’ve always been very sensitive to these small signals that people give, that say so much about what they’re feeling at that moment.”
In 1994, Lee was tapped to direct his first English-language film Sense & Sensibility (1995), a Jane Austen drama set in 18th century England, even though he was unfamiliar with the author or period. However, the film’s critical and commercial success consequently launched his career into the stratosphere.
In a similar way, Chen was also approached to direct Drift, a French-British-Greek co-production about a Liberian refugee (Cynthia Erivo) eking out a living in Greece. Chen knew little about the politics of Liberia or the social dynamics of Greece. But when he read the script, he instinctively understood the character’s struggle with loneliness, displacement and acceptance of the past. After all, his first two films were also centred on women adrift in their own lives: a Filipino domestic helper working in Singapore (Ilo Ilo) and a Malaysian school teacher working in Singapore (Wet Season).
He says: “When I read the Drift screenplay by Susanne Farrell and Alexander Maksik (based on Maksik’s novel A Marker To Measure Drift), I cried a lot because I was so moved. Later, while making the film, I also cried while shooting some scenes. There’s a lot there I can connect with.”
On the outside looking in
What makes him so sensitive to the struggles of the outsider even though he had, as he put it, a relatively “ordinary, middle-class upbringing” in Singapore? He says: “To be honest, I always felt like I didn’t quite fit in in Singapore. When I went to London in 2008 to do my master’s in directing at the National Film and Television School, I met my future wife, got married and stayed in London for 15 years – where I also didn’t feel at home.”
In 2022, Chen, his wife and their four-year-old son relocated to Hong Kong because of her job in finance. His new experience of migration is feeding again into his screen stories of displaced characters. But by the same token, he says that the constant need to adapt to new environments has sharpened his filmmaking skills, as he is always “forced to quickly study the specific cultural norms and social behaviour of a particular place”.
Like Drift, The Breaking Ice, shot in Yanji, China, has an extraordinary sense of locale. Even though Chen had very limited time to shoot each setting, he and the camera team were able to deftly employ the cold, wintry backdrops to enrich the film’s emotional story about three estranged young people in a love triangle. Variety called the film “poignant, poised… (and) beautifully played”.
Looking ahead, Chen is working with Barunson C&C, a subsidiary of Barunson E&A – the Korean company behind the 2020 Best Picture Oscar winner Parasite – on a new Korean film called Sunset Park. He is also reuniting with actors Yeo Yann Yann and Koh Jia Ler for his third Singapore feature, titled We Are All Strangers. Also in the pipeline is an untitled sci-fi film, which he says will be his “biggest film” yet.
Asked how other Singapore filmmakers might replicate his international success, he says: “Distance lends perspective: it was only after leaving Singapore and living in London that the ideas for my first film Ilo Ilo crystallised. If they can, they should leave Singapore and live somewhere else so they can make new connections and develop a more universal understanding of the human experience.
“Another important challenge for filmmakers is to cultivate honesty, sincerity and vulnerability. It is only when you can tell a story that speaks truly from the heart that your story can resonate globally: Ilo Ilo, for instance, is a story set in a HDB flat with just four people. Yet even to this day, I have people from around the world come up to me with their Ilo Ilo DVDs and pictures, asking me to sign them because this low-budget, simple film about ordinary people in a small flat touched their hearts.
“In filmmaking, you have to tell the truth and nothing else.”
Anthony Chen’s film Drift will be screened on Dec 5 and 10 at the Singapore International Film Festival. Visit sgiff.com.
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