A Sean Baker project arriving in the middle of awards-season afterglow already comes with its own kind of charge, but “Sandiwara” had an extra wrinkle: it’s a short film made in collaboration with self-portrait, the London fashion house, as part of the brand’s Residency program—a crossover that doesn’t read like a glossy “fashion film” so much as Baker dragging a sponsor’s resources back toward street-level, indie-first storytelling.
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The official trailer plays up that collision of worlds: an immersive, food-and-music-forward snapshot of Malaysian culture, staged within Penang’s vibrant cityscape and night-market life, with Academy Award winner Michelle Yeoh (“Everything Everywhere All At Once”) at its center. The brand’s logline frames Yeoh’s work as “transformative,” while positioning the film as a celebration of womanhood, cultural identity, and culinary heritage—big thematic language attached to a tight, immediate setting.
Baker, who largely dominated the 2025 Oscars with his indie “Anora,” wrote and directed “Sandiwara,” and he also edited and shot it—an all-hands approach that fits his long-running interest in doing things the hard way, with maximum control and minimal distance between the camera and the subject.
The film’s title comes from the Malay word for “drama,” “theatrical performance,” or “play.” The trailer leans into that idea of performance as both structure and subject—Yeoh playing multiple roles, moving through the night market as a set of different faces and lives rather than a single, linear protagonist. It’s a smart fit for Baker, whose best work tends to find the story inside the ecosystem: the people selling, watching, flirting, hustling, cooking, singing, passing through.
The collaboration itself is part of self-portrait’s Residency, a platform the brand said launched in 2024 to support independent creatives across disciplines by giving them access to its infrastructure and resources while letting them “dream, experiment and create on their own terms.” If that sounds like corporate mission-statement language, Baker’s quoted take from the announcement pulled it back to something concrete: he described the project as an extension of his love of independent cinema and a chance to celebrate Malaysian culture in a “big way,” with the freedom to make something that stretched beyond the usual fashion-and-film handshake.
“Sandiwara” is slated for a Berlinale Special screening on February 13, followed by a conversation with Baker and Yeoh. It will then land everywhere on February 20, per the film’s official site. Watch the new trailer below.
