Singapore has never produced a wuxia feature film — until now. Director Nelson Yeo's The House on the Moon will world premiere in the international competition at the Locarno Film Festival, and Variety has exclusively unveiled a first clip ahead of the screening (Variety).

Wuxia is the Chinese genre of sword-fighting heroes and martial fantasy, the tradition behind King Hu's classical epics and Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time. It was once a fixture of Singaporean television in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when serials cast actors like Li Nanxing and Zhu Ming. But no Singaporean feature film had attempted the form before Yeo's project.

The House on the Moon reimagines the legend of Chang'Er, the moon goddess, and her husband Hou Yi, the archer. The story picks up after Chang'Er ascends to the moon, setting her on a journey to its dark side alongside a bandit from Earth. The film blends science fiction with wuxia, a combination Yeo told Variety he arrived at through a lifetime of watching Hong Kong genre cinema — citing Tsui Hark's Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain and Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time as touchstones.

Yeo is no stranger to Locarno. His 2023 debut feature Dreaming & Dying premiered in the festival's Cineasti del Presente section and won the Golden Leopard for Filmmakers of the Present plus the Swatch First Feature Award. He also attended the Locarno Filmmakers Academy in 2018. His return to the festival, this time in the top competition section, places him among the filmmakers Locarno has championed early.

The production spans four countries: a co-production of Singapore, Taiwan, Germany and Indonesia, with a runtime of 99 minutes in colour and DCP format (Locarno Film Festival). Germany's Weydemann Bros boarded the project early this year (Screen Daily). Parallax Films acquired worldwide sales rights in July, excluding German-speaking territories, Taiwan and Singapore (Variety).

Shooting the film meant leaving Singapore for part of the production. Yeo told Variety that sourcing period props and finding suitable locations in modern Singapore proved difficult, pushing part of the shoot to Taiwan — his first time filming there. The Taiwan leg brought in Lee Kang-sheng, the Taiwanese actor and longtime collaborator of director Tsai Ming-liang, whose involvement was confirmed alongside principal cast member Lim Shi An earlier this year (Variety).

The bandit character carries a distinctive creative choice: written to speak Singlish — the English-based creole of everyday Singaporean life — and cast to give audiences a human entry point among a story otherwise populated by immortals. It is the kind of detail that grounds a lunar fantasy in something recognisably local.

For Singapore, a small film industry that exports more through festival prestige than box-office muscle, The House on the Moon adds a new string — a genre the country's cinema had never touched on the big screen, arriving on one of Europe's oldest festival stages.