No point in being a victim: Annette Lee, 34, on dealing with S'porean cynicism towards local films & influencers

From SGAG Skits to a Bak Kut Teh Love Letter

Annette Lee's path to feature filmmaking runs through Singapore's most recognisable meme factory. After majoring in digital filmmaking at university, she joined SGAG in 2016 and, by her account, ended up in front of the camera only because no one else would be — the platform's video team was a one-person operation at the time. That constraint shaped her instincts as a self-described "one-man show" who would write, shoot, direct, produce, edit and then star in her own content. Her debut feature, "Dream Stall", is built in the same mould: she conceptualised and directed it, co-wrote the script, plays protagonist Enya, and even sings on the soundtrack. The film frames itself as, in the article's words, "a love letter to the Singaporean identity, analogised through a bak kut teh stall" — a deliberately local premise for a filmmaker whose earlier work lived on phone screens rather than cinema screens.

Funding It Without Selling Out

The business model behind "Dream Stall" is, in some ways, as distinctive as the film. Lee told Mothership she rejected the well-worn Singaporean template of "badvertisements", the article's phrasing, and instead assembled a patchwork of sponsors, outside investors and her own savings. Sponsors were admitted only when they slotted naturally into the storyboard — Singapore Oceanarium hosted a plot-pivotal date scene — and she stresses she took nothing from her family. "I just work like dog for the last few years," she is quoted as saying, with the candid self-explanation that the project was a passion bet rather than a commercial one. Her husband, she adds, was initially "very worried" because the margins looked thin. The accounts are notable because they sidestep the standard sponsorship-heavy route and lean on the creator economy infrastructure Lee built for a decade.

Cynicism as Default — and Choosing Not to Be Its Target

The harder obstacle, the article suggests, was cultural rather than financial. Lee acknowledges a "default negative" sentiment toward local art, compounded by her profile as a young, female, influencer-turned-director. On a HardwareZone thread, commenters dismissed her acting, the local film scene and her social media roots; one told her to "go fly kite lah." Yet when the journalist raises this directly, Lee reframes it: "People have been so nice," she insists. The dismissal, in her telling, comes from a minority, and the productive response is not to litigate each comment. She rejects the victim frame explicitly, telling Mothership, "if every day you wake up and you remind yourself that you're a victim, you'll never get anything done." It is a philosophy she layers onto her own self-assessment as a "recovering perfectionist", and it gives the profile its narrative spine: a creator who took Singaporean scepticism as a known cost rather than an insurmountable barrier — and whose film, the article reports, drew unusually warm responses from media and MPs, framed as the most notable local cinematic success since Anthony Chen's "Ilo Ilo" in 2013.