He just premiered Drift at Sundance and mainland Chinese rom drama The Breaking Ice (among our most anticipated films for ’23) is in the can and ready for a major festival launch, and his next year plus ahead is pretty much booked. Providing Deadline with a major update on the next films that are on his slate and production co. slate, Anthony Chen will be moving into his US-set project debut which when all is said and done would be set for a 2025 premiere. Singaporean Joel Tan has adapted the short story for the screen.
Set for a possible 2024 shoot, Chen will base Heartbeat: A New York Story on a short story Tea For Two, by acclaimed Taiwanese writer Pai Hsien-yung. This will look at the rarely-told experiences of the Asian gay community during the AIDS epidemic in 1980s New York and work with obvious themes of grief but also self-discovery. Chen’s Giraffe Pictures will produce the film with Chinese producer Lou Ying’s Paradigm Shift Entertainment.
The globetrotting Chen will next direct his first Korean project in and then move onto We Are All Strangers – which is set up for a summer shoot. This film closes out the trilogy that began with Ilo Ilo and Wet Season. And we’re not done with the project updates – Chen is also currently scripting and plans to direct an as-yet-untitled family drama set in present-day Hong Kong. So we’re using one hand here – Chen has at least four projects in the works.
Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson's This Teacher (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022 he served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).
