Anthony Chen On His Existential Crisis During Lockdown

Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen on his existential crisis during lockdown, directing a movie from his basement bedroom in London and making his third feature film with the same two lead actors

- Celine Tan

The year 2020 has been a write-off for much of the world, but for Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen, you could say it has been a write-on. As the planet ground to an almost standstill, the 37-year-old award-winning auteur took just a year to write his third feature film, titled We Are All Strangers. It’s a resounding achievement, considering he took three years to write 2019’s Wet Season, his follow-up to Ilo Ilo, the debut feature film which put him—and Singapore filmmaking—on the cinematic map. The 2013 movie garnered Chen the prestigious Caméra d’Or, an honour a filmmaker can only win once in his or her life, for the best first feature film presented in one of the Cannes Film Festival’s selections.

Not that the year in lockdown has been all smooth sailing for Chen. Like many of us, he struggled. He angsted. He worried about the theatrical release of Wet Season and the fate of filmmaking, when the pandemic rained out his sophomore feature’s chances of doing well at box offices with cinemas shuttered across the globe. “I was having very much a real existential crisis,” he tells us. “It really made me question if there was still hope for cinema and if audiences will return to the theatres when they reopen. And if they do, whether it would only be for the big studio tentpole films, from Marvel, Pixar and the like. Will a filmmaker like myself that makes sensitive, delicate and nuanced films still have a voice?”