A highlight on the festival circuit back in 2019, Anthony Chen’s Singaporean melodrama Wet Season––which was also the country’s Oscar entry––will finally arrive stateside next month via Strand Releasing. Set for an April 23 release, the film follows Mandarin-language teacher Ling who continues with fruitless IVF treatment while taking care of her ailing father-in-law. She finds herself slowly drawn towards a promising student who seems to have been abandoned by his parents. Outside its monsoon season, but Ling’s inner turmoil looks set to get her into a heap of trouble.
Rory O’Connor said in our review, “Wet Season was directed by Anthony Chen, a Singaporean native who won the Camera d’Or (the award for best first feature) at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival for Ilo Ilo, a movie in which a Filipino maid becomes unlikely friends with the unruly son of the family she has been hired to work for. Chen returns to that pseudo-mother-son relationship with Wet Season and once again uses it to cast an eye on the themes of class and social prejudice that quietly gave weight to his debut.”
See the trailer and poster below.
Wet Season arrives in NYC’s Village East on April 23 followed by a VOD and Virtual Cinema release on April 30.