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| Credit: Locarno Festival |
As the first Singaporean filmmaker to showcase his feature film at the prestigious Locarno Festival based in Switzerland, Chris Yeo Siew Hua does the nation proud again by being the first winner of the Pardo d'oro (Golden Leopard) with his sophomore fiction feature A Land Imagined, a neo-noir thriller twined around a detective's investigation of the disappearance of a Chinese construction worker from a land reclamation site.
With a twist noted by trade press Screen Daily as a revelation of "an ambitious filmmaker striving to subvert expectations," Yeo's pedigree in blending the different sensibilities of different forms is evident from his past works; graduating amongst the top of his cohort while he was a student studying in Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s School of Media Studies, his debut feature In The House of Straw travelled widely, premiering in competition at the Bangkok International Film Festival in 2009, and presented at the Sao Paulo International Film Festival in 2010. He followed up with his second major work, the experimental music documentary The Obs: A Singapore Story, about The Observatory, commonly hailed as Singapore's most important independent band, in 2015.
An award-winning cinematographer, Yeo has also lensed the Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen’s short film The Bohemian Rhapsody Project in 2006, and pioneering filmmaker Sun Koh’s omnibus film project Lucky7 in 2010. Yeo was a resident of the Grey Project's Berlin Residency Programme 2018, and also works with the experimental art space soft/WALL/studs on its film programme. His latest work Stranger Eyes is currently being produced by Akanga Film Asia's Fran Borgia, and has been shortlisted in the latest Asian Project Market organised by the Busan International Film Festival, alongside fellow Singaporean project I See Waves, produced by potocol's Jeremy Chua.
A Land Imagined is currently represented by US-based sales agent Visit Films, and news are still pending as to the film's Singaporean release.