A tender, occasionally kitschy portrait of family, class and place, Anthony Chen’s We Are All Strangers closes his Growing Up trilogy and made its debut at the Berlinale
Anthony Chen’s new film, We Are All Strangers, returns the Singaporean director to familiar territory: intimate family dramas that double as quiet civic portraits. Playing in competition at the Berlinale as the final installment of what Chen calls his Growing Up trilogy, the film traces small lives and daily rituals to sketch a city’s emotional contours. Rather than grand historical gestures, Chen leans on the mundane—births, marriages, jobs, grief—to reveal how a nation readies itself for a milestone moment.
Story and characters
The film revolves around overlapping households and the compromises they force. Junyang drifts through episodic work; Boon Kiat runs a bustling noodle shop; Lydia’s pregnancy reshapes relationships and budgets. When two couples and a child end up under one roof, timelines compress and generational frictions surface. The plot is spare—less a chain of events than a series of moments that accumulate into something larger.
Directorial approach and tone
Chen’s filmmaking remains restrained and observant. He favors long takes, steady framing and a camera that keeps a respectful distance from its characters. This measured approach highlights gestures and silences, making micro-expressions and small rituals—wedding choreography, communal fireworks-watching—carry the film’s emotional freight. Ambient sound and interiors dominate the soundscape, further rooting the movie in quotidian reality.
The movie balances close, low-key portraiture with occasional flashes of spectacle. At times it slips into the glossy, staged brightness of social-media celebrations; at others it retreats into a softer, humbler register. Those shifts can feel uneven, but they also mirror the film’s central tension: aspiration set against constrained opportunity.
Performances and collaborators
Chen reunites with familiar collaborators. Yeo Yann Yann brings practiced warmth and steady resilience to Bee Hwa, while Koh Jia Ler—who first worked with Chen as a child—remains a compelling presence, his performance threaded through the director’s career. Andi Lim helps supply the generational friction that anchors the family dynamics. Across the board, the acting favors understatement: actors often say less than they show, and the film trusts the audience to piece together motives from gestures and pauses.
Visual and musical choices
Visually, Chen mixes naturalistic lighting with carefully composed frames—doorways, windows and layered interiors recur, suggesting intimacy that can also feel confining. Communal settings such as the noodle shop and the shared compound function as the film’s social hubs, mapping relationships more than propelling plot.
The soundtrack alternates between incidental realism and celebration. A full wedding number—slick, choreographed, Instagram-ready—sits beside quieter domestic soundscapes, underscoring how public exuberance and private strain coexist in the same city.
Industry context and reception
We Are All Strangers has attracted international attention, fitting neatly into a festival appetite for films that are locally specific yet emotionally accessible. Paradise City Sales is handling worldwide deals, and ARP Selection has picked up French theatrical rights—an early sign of confidence from the arthouse circuit. Financial backing includes contributions from the Singapore Film Commission, the Red Sea Fund and the MPA APSA Academy Film Fund, with executive producers such as Joe Tsai and Arthur Wang lending industry heft.
Critics at the Berlinale have largely praised Chen’s restraint and his reliance on micro-expression over rhetorical explanation. Early commentary points to the film’s formal elegance and the strength of its performances as its most persuasive assets.
Critical reading and legacy
At its best, We Are All Strangers reads as a compassionate, detail-rich portrait of contemporary Singapore: a mosaic of small compromises, quiet resentments, stubborn hopes. Chen’s allegiance to social-realist textures—everyday sounds, workaday settings, modest lighting—keeps the film grounded, even when certain sequences verge on sentimentality or theatricality.
Story and characters
The film revolves around overlapping households and the compromises they force. Junyang drifts through episodic work; Boon Kiat runs a bustling noodle shop; Lydia’s pregnancy reshapes relationships and budgets. When two couples and a child end up under one roof, timelines compress and generational frictions surface. The plot is spare—less a chain of events than a series of moments that accumulate into something larger.0