Lee Kang-sheng Observes in U.S. Trailer for Yeo Siew Hua’s Stranger Eyes

After landing on our radar with his Golden Leopard-winning feature A Land Imagined, Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua returned to the festival circuit last fall with his Venice premiere Stranger Eyes. The mysterious drama, starring Tsai Ming-liang regular Lee Kang-sheng, will now get a release on August 29 from Film Movement and the new trailer has arrived.

Here’s the synopsis: “After enduring months of a fruitless police investigation into the disappearance of their daughter, a young, estranged couple, Junyang and Peiying, realize they are bring filmed surreptitiously when they begin receiving mysterious packages at their door containing DVDs with footage of their daily lives. The moments captured are unnerving not only for the violation of their privacy, but for what is exposed about Junyang and Peiying’s relationship on a most intimate level. Suspecting their voyeur is responsible for taking their daughter, the couple embark on a desperate mission to seek him out, only to find the truth of his identity is more complicated than it seems.”

Leonardo Goi said in his Venice review, “In a film so concerned with our current media regime––the way we produce and consume images of each other––Lee saunters into Stranger Eyes as a kind of anomaly. There is a stark contrast between the surgical eyes of CCTV cameras and the actor’s own, the way surveillance devices capture reality and how Lee’s Wu processes it. I do not mean to downplay Wu and Panna’s turns. The former in particular channels a feverish angst, and his transformation from object of Wu’s obsession into voyeur himself largely works. But Stranger Eyes belongs to Lee. Whether or not Yeo wrote it with him in mind, I can’t think of a better performer to flesh out the chasm that powers the film: between different ways of looking, between fears as old as time itself and the state-of-the-art technology used to bring them to light.”

See the trailer below.