If Singapore writer-director Anthony Chen has his way, the next time he makes a film with Yeo Yann Yann, she will be playing a grandmother.

The 49-year-old Malaysian actress bursts into laughter.

He teases, turning to her: “Maybe you are Ah Ma.”

Before she can recover, local actor Koh Jia Ler, 25, jumps in with another observation.

“Anthony has become more naggy now. He became like this after having a son,” says Koh, grinning. “Maybe in my past life, I was his son. He’s always nagging at me.”

The exchange says everything about the relationship the three have built over the past 14 years.

They are no longer simply a director and his cast, but, as Chen, 42, puts it, a “constructed family”.

“It’s like someone who has lived overseas for a long time and comes back during Chinese New Year,” says the Hong Kong-based film-maker and father of an eight-year-old boy. “It takes two minutes, the ice melts, and you reconnect.

“We know each other’s buttons – which buttons to push, which buttons not to push, and even the buttons we shouldn’t push but still do.”

The trio are back together again for We Are All Strangers, which opens in Singapore cinemas on Aug 20 and completes Chen’s Growing Up trilogy. It comprises Ilo Ilo (2013) and Wet Season (2019), which also featured Yeo and Koh in the lead roles.

In the concluding chapter, Koh plays 21-year-old Junyang, whose relationship with his hawker father (played by Andi Lim) begins to unravel when Junyang and his girlfriend (Regene Lim) confront unexpected adult realities.

Into the household steps Yeo’s Bee Hwa, a vivacious Malaysian “beer lady” who unsettles the father-son dynamic – and gradually finds an unlikely home within the family as Junyang’s stepmother.