Singaporean filmmaker Tan Siyou hasn’t spent much time at home since his debut feature Amoeba Premiere in the discovery department of the Toronto International Film Festival.
Later, the movie on the Busan movie festival at the A -window at the Asian cinema, before moving to Pingya, where it scoped three awards, including the Ranice Tay’s best actor, as well as the Junior Jury Prize and the Cinepilia Critics award.
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“It has been interesting to see how the audience of different countries reacted to the movie,” says Tan, who grew up in Singapore and moved to Los Angeles while studying a film at Wesleyan University. “In Toronto, we had a lot of Asian people who said it helped them explain to the Canadians how things were at home.
“In Korea, they understood the cultural context, but they were curious about mixing languages,” Tan continues. “It is natural for us Singaporeans to combine several languages in one sentence, but Busan screening made me reflect on showing the movie in a homogeneous culture – how does it come across?”
The film, located at an authoritarian girls’ school in Singapore, follows a teenage abuse (TAY), which attracts the attention of three other girls, which also rub the school’s very tight rules – hair and skirt lengths measured by a ruler and not dyed bra. The girls will become quick friends, hang out after school in a cave they have found on a construction site; In the meantime, two girls stumble upon each other’s inverse desire to try to describe evidence of a ghost.
When Uncle Phoon – Taiwanese veteran Jack Kao – tells them stories about triad groups that once wandered in the streets of Colonial Singapore, the girls decide to set up their own gang. But they will soon be reminded that in today’s Singapore, such activities are illegal and may make them expel them from school.
The dialogue is mixed with English and China, which, as Tan has stated, is perfectly normal in Singapore – in a multicultural society with four official languages, including Tamili and Malay.
Tan who previously made a short film Strawberry cheesecake He also wanted to dismantle some of the “Chinese” or at least ask how this very successful urban state, by far the richest of Southeast Asia, ended up on the conformist. The girls’ school is called Confuciy Girls Secondary School, which as Tan explains, is a bit of a joke.
“As I grew up in Singapore, confucianism meant respect for the elders and the family, which sounds good. There is a much darker side for confucce, which is actually very patriarchal,” Tan says. “According to the confucue values, a woman is assumed to have three obedience in her life – her father, husband and son. And girls are not meant to go to school, so it is called a conferial girls’ school is a bit ironic.”
He continues, “But I believe that the confucue values are subliminally, which anchor the society of modern Singapore. Because people dominated by society are mostly Chinese, they were settlements and do not with indigenous people to Singapore, and this perception of society is a well -known concept.”
But he adds that Singapore’s capitalist nature also makes it so authoritarian. One of the world’s most advanced countries, and Asia’s highest GDP inhabitant, Singapore began to get rich since the 1970s under government policy, which mixed business entrepreneurship on the sidewalks of democratic freedom.
“At least my experience of growing up school was that you have to follow, you have to get good grades and go to a good school, otherwise you won’t get a good job,” Tan says. “The idea is that you will become a productive employee in society and you will continue to feed the capitalist machine. So this combination of capitalism and confucianism makes the country so conservative.”
Everyone who is not suitable for this machine – triangles, activists, trade unions – usually just disappear, Tan explains. Even the songs of gang-related songs are illegal in Singapore, and authorities have been severely broken into triangles since the 1980s.
Likewise, anyone who does not become a productive citizen by getting married and having children also struggling. Ironically, given a high standard of living, Singapore is not as tolerant of LGBTQ+ lifestyle as some other countries of Southeast Aase. When the government finally legalized the same -sex activity in 2023, it passed the constitutional change to prevent the debate on all kinds of same -sex marriage at the same time.
Internal- AmoebaIt is proposed that the two girls between the two girls are proposed, but deliberately is not implemented. “I think the movie is strange, but it’s not on your face. I was more interested in studying such a fluency and formation because they have not yet been formed,” Tan says. “But I think in Singapore most people who have decided this, they want in their lives, still find that their partner is not called to family members.”
Tan’s previous short films Hi ahmA (2019) and Strawberry cheesecake (2021) also studied Singapore’s culture and identity and screened at festivals such as Toronto, Locarno and Berlin. He also combined the Philippine Don Josephus Raphael Ebhan with a short film, Cutting cold2024 edition of the Sublined Mass Factory in Cannes.
He met him Amoeba Producer, Singa’s Akanga movie Fran Borg at Southeast Asian Film Laboratory at the Singapore International Film Festival in 2019. He is known to work with leading Singapore’s talents such as Siew Hua Yeo (Alien eyes) and boo junfeng (Apprentice), Borgia produced Tan’s short film Strawberry cheesecake and sets up their debut features as international co -production.
The film’s producers include Denis Vaslin’s Volya films, Antoine Simkine French Les Films D’Antoine, Luis Romer Spanish Mararía and Han Sunhee Korean The Widelog Office. The film received a new Singapore instructor from the Singapore Film Commission and funding from the Hubert Bals Fund, the Netherlands Film Fund, Cinémas du Monde of France and SFFilm Rain Aid with the US Bangkok -based Diversion.
Tan says he has found four young actors-Tay, Nicole Lee, Lim Shi-An and Genevieve Tan-extended casting call. “None of them have made a movie before – two had been in short films and two in the theater. We met a lot of potential actors and four of them really stand out,” Tan says. “We practiced their scenes extensively and we had a great job.”
The chemistry between the actors and the director is clearly reflected in the film, which has already led to the best acting victory for Tay, who was to accept the prize in Pingyao in person.
And it seems that the actors and crews of the movie are on their way. The upcoming festival shows include AFI Fest, Hamburg, Bangkok and Taiwan’s Golden Horse Film Festival and awards, where the film has just been named the best new director. Later in the year, many of the festival’s departure and arrival times are expected.
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