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James Mottram

It is 40 years since 1984, the year in which George Orwell’s prophetic dystopian book was set, but the world the British writer predicted, where privacy had all but evaporated and Big Brother was watching, seems ever closer.
At the recent Venice International Film Festival, Asian filmmakers tackled the subject of surveillance with intriguing results.
“I mean, we’re living in a moment now … I think a lot of films need to deal with this reality, right?” suggested Yeo Siew Hua, the Singaporean director behind the slow-burn thriller Stranger Eyes.
Set in modern-day Singapore, Stranger Eyes begins with Junyang (Wu Chien-ho) and Peiying (Anicca Panna) desperately searching for their abducted daughter, Little Bo.


Things get even worse when the couple begin to receive DVD recordings of their everyday movements, an unnerving phenomenon that immediately recalls Michael Haneke’s 2005 thriller Hidden.
The police install a security camera outside their home – one more in a city state where every street corner has them.
“Already from before, I am someone who notices the amount of cameras around me,” said Hua, who wrote the script inspired by this phenomenon. “It is not even covert. It’s pretty blatant, the state of the surveillance in Singapore, but in Singapore, I think the state is very proud about the surveillance.”
In May 2023, there were just over 109,000 CCTV cameras in Singapore, or about 18 per 10,000 people. The government plans to add another 90,000 by the end of 2030 “for the safety of the people”, said Hua, who puts this acceleration of cameras down to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“For me, things have changed so rapidly. For example, 10 years ago, we were asking, ‘Oh, should we allow encroachments of our privacy?’ Now it’s a fact, and we need to ask the question: how do we coexist with being constantly watched?”

But is it a bad thing that we are being watched all the time? Surely, if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear?
While Singapore’s crime rates are low, Hua noted there are other costs in trading civil liberties for safety and orderliness.
“What does it mean to behave and to go about your daily life knowing that someone is always watching you? Are you ever going to fulfil your true human potential?”
Examining the same topic from a slightly different angle was Japanese drama Happyend, the narrative feature debut from Neo Sora, the son of the legendary late composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Focusing on a tight-knit group of school friends, Sora’s near-future film shows their principal installing new security in the school that uses up-to-the-minute facial recognition technology. Pupils’ bad behaviour is catalogued and punished, using a points system that sees them marked down.
“It’s basically using shame in order to control and suppress bad behaviour,” Sora explained.


Sora does not feel that using surveillance cameras is a “fundamental cure” for crime.
“I think we should be using resources, manpower – everything we have – in order to try to solve the fundamental problem, which is usually inequality, racism, loss of opportunity, all these things.
“And we have the resources to do that, considering how many billionaires there are in the world, but they won’t use their money for anything like that. So instead, we use threat and shame and guilt and all these things in order to try to control the behaviours of people.”
The film even alludes to the prison design known as the “panopticon”. Created by the 18th-century English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham, this rotunda-style design allows all prisoners of an institution to be watched by a single guard without them knowing whether they are actually being observed or not.
“I think we do live in this kind of panopticon, but it’s interesting, because unlike the model that [Bentham] proposed, we do it willingly through our phones,” Sora said. “I mean, I have an iPhone and I have all the social medias.”


Whether it is data harvesting via Facebook or the government monitoring your posts on X or Instagram, it has long been clear that our social media output is being tracked. Likewise, we can personally follow others’ activity through our social media accounts.
“This relationship of seeing and being seen has exponentially intensified in this current moment,” Hua said. “I guess for me, the question is to ask [is], ‘What does it mean for us to exist in this kind of reality? To be so intensely interconnected, but at the same time very alienated?’
“We’re no longer looking, we’re scrolling. Can we take a moment to really pay attention to what we’re seeing? Even to project our own humanity onto what we’re seeing? …
“Increasingly I’m worried that we’re no longer doing that. I’m being watched by a bunch of machines, right? I’m now purely data, right? Whether for the state or for big corporates. I’m afraid we’re losing this engagement of seeing someone else: a human looking at another human being.”
Meanwhile, Asif Kapadia’s drama-documentary 2073 examined the state of the planet 50 years in the future.
Inspired by Chris Marker’s photo-led futuristic short La Jetée (1962), the film is set in 2073 and features Samantha Morton playing a woman who lives in a basement below a shopping mall who spends her days scavenging to survive in a dystopian world.


It is a world where Chairperson Trump – Ivanka, not Donald, as it happens – will be celebrating her 30th year in power.
The film interweaves this fiction with factual analysis of where it all went wrong, from AI to climate change to the re-rise of fascism. Of course, mass surveillance features too – with tech billionaires like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and X’s Elon Musk taken to task.
So bleak is the picture painted by Kapadia, who lays all the world’s problems to bare, that it left some critics dumbfounded.
“By comparison, George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 looks as jolly as a Peppa Pig picture book,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter.

Thankfully, Orwell’s book – which was brought memorably to the screen, in 1984, by director Michael Radford, with John Hurt as lead character Winston Smith – remains as relevant as ever.
Earlier this year, Audible released a new all-star version of the audiobook, featuring Andrew Garfield as Smith and Tom Hardy as the all-seeing Party leader Big Brother.
Once again, the doom mongering prevailed. When Garfield was asked, for a promotional video, what the world might be like in 40 years’ time, he simply replied: “I think [we’re] just going to get a worse version of what we’re in now.”
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Stranger Eyes, Happyend and 2073 take a worrying look at surveillance in Singapore, Japan and a Chairperson Trump-led future, respectively


Stranger Eyes, Happyend and 2073 take a worrying look at surveillance in Singapore, Japan and a Chairperson Trump-led future, respectively.
