Singapore has never really had a wuxia feature film – though the genre was a fixture of local television in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a wave of wuxia serials cast actors like Li Nanxing and Zhu Ming.
Nelson Yeo is closing that gap with “The House on the Moon,” a lunar reimagining of the Chang’Er myth landing in Locarno’s international competition. Variety is exclusively unveiling a clip from the film, ahead of its world premiere.
Wuxia is the Chinese genre of sword-fighting heroes and martial fantasy that has powered everything from King Hu’s classics to Wong Kar-wai’s “Ashes of Time.”
“It was quite ambitious when we first started having this idea of picking wuxia,” Yeo tells Variety. “For this one I decided to fully embrace genre and see where the film can take us.”
Yeo has a habit of returning to Locarno. He attended the festival’s Filmmakers Academy in 2018, then premiered his 2023 debut feature, “Dreaming & Dying,” there, where it won the Filmmakers of the Present Golden Leopard and the Swatch First Feature Award. Three years on, he’s back for a third time.
