Anthony Chen used a panel at the Far East Film Festival in Udine on Saturday to deliver a scathing critique of social media’s influence on human attention, film culture and what he calls the fundamental experience of being human. The remarks came a day after his film We Are All Strangers, the final installment of his Singapore Coming of Age trilogy, opened the festival.
“I really think it’s damaging the film culture, but I don’t think it’s just damaging the film culture,” Chen said. “I feel like it undermines our humanity in general.”
Chen said he has never installed TikTok and sets his phone to airplane mode during screenings, forcing him to go to the theater twice a week. These disciplines, he explained, are a deliberate antidote to distractions that even industry experts see as draining. He expressed concern about how short-form content is affecting viewers’ attention spans, citing reports from novelists that publishers are demanding front-loaded plots and removing the slow character-building that once characterized literary fiction.
Chen also echoed remarks from a respected Chinese filmmaker who spoke in Hong Kong a few weeks ago, expressing concerns about AI. The filmmaker argued that outsourcing decision-making to machine intelligence is a form of self-erasure. “If you let AI make decisions for you, you are no longer human,” Chen said, adding that people who rely on tools like ChatGPT to make choices risk giving away something essential. “Once you start doing that, you lose your sense of humanity,” Chen said.
He expressed cautious optimism that this culture would eventually be corrected. “We kind of circle back,” he said. “We’re going to go back to the humanities because I think that’s why we have civilization.”
The social media threads connect directly through “We Are All Strangers,” in which Yoh Yang Yang, Chen’s collaborator on all three films, plays a character who becomes a livestreaming personality. Yang said that almost every day before filming began, he researched a particular streamer that Chen had introduced him to, but realized he wasn’t moved by the medium. “I think I’m old school,” she said. “Probably not a bad thing.”
The panel discussion, moderated by June Kim, covered the more than 10-year collaboration between Chen, Yang Yang, and lead actor Ko Jia La. Ko Zia Rah was cast in a 10-month search involving 8,000 children at the age of 11, rediscovered on Instagram at the age of 17, and now, at 25, has appeared in the final installment of the trilogy. Yang Yang plays a different character each time. She played a teacher in “Wet Season” and a stepmother in “We Are All Strangers,” about how her working relationship with Coe changed over 14 years. When she first met him on the set of Iloilo, where she was seven months pregnant at the time, she laid down strict rules about how he should talk to her on set. Years later, he told her of his first impression, “I felt like I had encountered a mountain,” she said.
The rehearsal process for the third film was the most immersive of the three films. The cast, crew, and Chen all shared a home, cooked together, and ran sessions in between location scouting. “We come to rehearsals like going home,” Yang Yang said. She explained that their working relationship throughout the trilogy, both on screen and off, went from being truly estranged to indistinguishable from family.
The origins of this project’s story go back to a real conversation. Ko, 17, had failed most of his school subjects, but told Chen he wanted to drop out, and Chen eventually persuaded the boy’s parents to allow him. Over the next few years, Coe worked as a food delivery driver, parcel courier, bar worker, and livestreamer selling mobile accessories. These experiences were directly reflected in his third portrait of a young man thrown into adult life unprepared.
Director Chen, who just turned 42 last week and was in his 40s while making the film, talked about his “Iloilo” trilogy, which is set during the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The “Rainy Season” was set against the background of social unrest in the early 2010s. And “We Are All Strangers,” which was inspired by last year’s 60th anniversary of Singapore’s independence, depicts his own journey from his 20s to his 40s, and from being single to becoming a husband and father.
Regarding the film’s visual mission, director Cheng said he challenged his team to find the beauty of Singapore’s housing estates, bus rides and neighborhood kopitiams, a first in his 14-year career in urban photography. He said he was tired of movies that reduced working-class life to something brutal and grim. “Why can’t the working class experience love, hope and romance?” he asked. That optimism is a deliberate philosophical position, he added. “I still believe there is a hopeful strength within our humanity. That’s why we’re still here.”
He pointed out the invisible poverty that is unique to Singapore and is not seen in other regions. The country’s prosperity masks the conditions of permanent work simply to feed a family and keep pace with one of the world’s most expensive cities. “We are a country that sweeps a lot of things under the carpet,” he said.
The film’s English and Chinese titles intentionally contradict each other, with the English version reading “We Are All Strangers,” but the Chinese title translating as “We Are Not Strangers,” bookending the story from a lonely life to building a family, Chen said. He noted that some Chinese-reading festival attendees thought the discrepancy was false. “I think that’s a good thing,” he said. “It makes people wonder.”
