Anthony Chen used a panel at the Far East Film Festival, Udine, on Saturday to deliver a sharp critique of social media’s effect on human attention, cinema culture and what he called the fundamental experience of being human – remarks that came a day after his film “We Are All Strangers,” the concluding chapter of his Singapore growing-up trilogy, opened the festival.
“I really think it’s hurting cinema culture, but I just don’t think it’s just hurting cinema culture,” Chen said. “I feel like it’s hurting generally our humanity.”
Chen said he has never installed TikTok, sets his phone to airplane mode during screenings, and compels himself to attend the cinema twice a week – disciplines he described as a deliberate counterweight to distraction he sees consuming even industry professionals. He expressed alarm at what short-form content is doing to audience attention spans, drawing on reports from novelists who said publishers now demand front-loaded plots stripped of the slow character-building that once defined literary fiction.
Chen also raised concerns about AI, relaying a remark from a respected Chinese filmmaker he had spoken with in Hong Kong a few weeks earlier. That filmmaker had argued that outsourcing decisions to machine intelligence amounted to a form of self-erasure. “If you let AI make the decisions for yourself, you’re no longer human,” Chen quoted him as saying, adding that people who rely on tools like ChatGPT to make choices for them risk ceding something essential. “Once you start doing that, you lose your existence as a human being,” Chen said.
He expressed cautious optimism that the culture would eventually correct. “We are gonna sort of like, circle back,” he said. “We’re going to go back into the humanities again. Because I think that is why we have civilization.”
The social media thread runs directly through “We Are All Strangers,” in which Yeo Yann Yann – Chen’s collaborator across all three films of his trilogy – plays a character who becomes a livestreaming personality. Yann Yann said she studied a specific streamer Chen introduced her to almost every day before filming began, but found herself unmoved by the medium. “I think I’m old school,” she said. “Probably not a bad thing.”
The panel, moderated by June Kim, ranged across the decade-plus collaboration between Chen, Yann Yann and their lead actor Koh Jia Ler, who was cast at age 11 through a 10-month search beginning with 8,000 children, rediscovered on Instagram at 17, and now appears in the trilogy’s final film at 25. Yann Yann, who plays a different character in each installment – the boy’s mother in “Ilo Ilo,” his teacher in “Wet Season,” and his stepmother in “We Are All Strangers” – described how her working relationship with Koh has shifted over 14 years. When she first encountered him on the set of “Ilo Ilo,” then seven months pregnant, she laid down strict rules about how he should address her on set. Years later, she said, he told her his first impression: “I felt like I’m meeting a mountain.”
The rehearsal process for the third film was the most immersive of the three: cast, crew and Chen all shared a house, cooked together and ran sessions between location scouts. “We come to rehearsal like going home,” Yann Yann said. She described the working relationship across the trilogy as having travelled from genuine estrangement to something indistinguishable from family, on screen and off.
The project’s story origins trace to a real conversation. When Koh was 17 and had failed most of his school subjects, he told Chen he wanted to drop out, and Chen ended up persuading the boy’s parents to allow it. In the years that followed, Koh worked as a food delivery rider, a parcel courier, a bar worker and a livestreamer selling mobile accessories – experiences that fed directly into the third film’s portrait of a young man thrown unprepared into adult life.
Chen, who turned 42 only last week and was in his 40s during production, said the trilogy – spanning “Ilo Ilo,” set during the 1997 Asian financial crisis; “Wet Season,” set against a backdrop of civil unrest in the early 2010s; and “We Are All Strangers,” framed around Singapore’s 60th anniversary of independence last year – also charts his own passage from his 20s to his 40s, and from being single to becoming a husband and father.
On the film’s visual mission, Chen said he challenged his team to find beauty in Singapore’s housing estates, bus rides and neighborhood kopitiam for the first time across his 14-year career photographing the city. He said he grew tired of films that reduced working-class life to unrelenting grimness. “Why can’t the working class experience love and hope and romance?” he asked. That optimism, he added, is a deliberate philosophical position. “I sort of still believe that there’s that hopeful strength in our humanity, and that’s the reason why we’re still here.”
On Singapore’s particular form of poverty – invisible, he argued, in ways that hardship elsewhere is not – he was pointed. The country’s prosperity masks a condition of perpetual labor simply to sustain family and keep pace with one of the world’s most expensive cities. “We are a nation that we sweep a lot of stuff underneath the carpet,” he said.
The film’s English and Chinese titles deliberately contradict each other: where the English reads “We Are All Strangers,” the Mandarin title translates as “We Are Not Strangers” – bookends, Chen said, to a story that moves from isolated lives to found family. He noted that some festivalgoers who read Chinese had assumed the discrepancy was an error. “I think it’s a good thing,” he said. “It makes people wonder.”
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