Singaporean filmmaker Tan Siyou hasn’t spent much time at home since her debut feature Amoeba premiered in the Discovery section of Toronto International Film Festival.
Since then, the film screened at Busan film festival in the A Window On Asian Cinema section, before moving on to Pingyao, where it scooped three awards, including Best Actress for Ranice Tay’s performance, as well as the Youth Jury Award and Cinephilia Critics Award.
“It’s been interesting to see how audiences in different countries react to the film,” says Tan, who grew up in Singapore and moved to Los Angeles after studying film at Wesleyan University. “In Toronto, we had a lot of people of Asian origin who said it helped them explain to their fellow Canadians how things are back at home.
“In Korea, they understood the cultural context, but were curious about the mix of languages,” Tan continues. “For us Singaporeans, it’s natural to combine multiple languages in one sentence, but the Busan screening made me reflect on showing the film in a homogenous culture – how would it come across?”
Set in an authoritarian girls school in Singapore, the film follows a teenage misfit (Tay) who attracts the attention of three other girls also chafing against the school’s ultra strict rules – hair and skirt lengths measured with a ruler and no coloured bra straps on display. The girls become fast friends, hanging out after school in a cave they’ve discovered on a construction site; meanwhile two of the girls stumble across unexpressed desire for each other as they try to film evidence of a ghost.
When family driver Uncle Phoon – played by Taiwanese veteran Jack Kao – tells them stories of triad gangs who once roamed the streets of colonial Singapore, the girls decide to form their own gang. But they are soon reminded that, in modern-day Singapore, such activity is illegal and could get them expelled from school.
The dialogue is in a mix of English and Chinese, which as Tan has noted is perfectly normal in Singapore – a multicultural society with four official languages also including Tamil and Malay.
Tan, who previously made a short film Strawberry Cheesecake also set in a girls school, says she wanted to unpack some of the “Chinese-ness of Singapore” in the film – or at least ask how this hugely successful city-state, the richest by far in Southeast Asia, ended up being so conformist. The girls’ school is called Confucius Girls’ Secondary School, which as Tan explains is a bit of a joke.
“When I was growing up in Singapore, Confucianism meant respect for elders and family, which all sounds good. But there’s a much darker side to Confucianism that is actually very patriarchal,” Tan says. “According to Confucian values, a woman is supposed to have three obediences in her life – to her father, her husband and to her son. And girls are not supposed to go to school, so calling it the Confucious Girls’ school is a bit of irony.”
She continues: “But I actually think that Confucian values are subliminally what anchors modern Singapore society. Because, the people who control society are mostly Chinese, they were settlers and not indigenous to Singapore, and this concept of society being more important than the individual, is very much a part of Confucianism.”
But she adds that it’s also the capitalist nature of Singapore that makes it so authoritarian. One of the most highly developed countries in the world, with the highest GDP per capita in Asia, Singapore started to get rich from the 1970s onwards under government policies that mixed business entrepreneurship with curbs on democratic freedom.
“At least my experience in school growing up was that you need to obey, you need to get good grades and go to a good school, otherwise you won’t get a good job,” say Tan. “The idea is that you become a productive worker in society and continue to feed the capitalist machine. So it’s this combination of capitalism and Confucianism that makes the country so conservative.”
Anyone who doesn’t fit into this machine – triads, activists, labor unions – tend to just disappear, Tan explains. Even singing gang-related songs is illegal in Singapore and authorities have cracked down hard on triads since the 1980s.
Likewise anyone who doesn’t become a productive citizen by getting married and having kids will also struggle. Ironically, given its high standard of living, Singapore is not as tolerant of LGBTQ+ lifestyles as some other Southeast Asian nations. When the government finally legalised same-sex activity in 2023, it passed a constitutional amendment to block any debate about same-sex marriage at the same time.
In Amoeba, the attraction between two of the girls is suggested but deliberately not consummated. “I think the film is queer but it’s not in your face. I was more interested in exploring this kind of fluidity and formation, because they are not formed yet,” Tan says. “But I think in Singapore, most people who have decided this is what they want with their lives, would still find that their partner would not be invited to family gatherings.”
Tan’s previous short films Hello Ahma (2019) and Strawberry Cheesecake (2021) also explore Singapore culture and identity and screened at festivals including Toronto, Locarno and Berlin. She also paired with the Philippines’ Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan on a short film, Cold Cut, for the 2024 edition of Directors Factory, which screened at Cannes.
She met her Amoeba producer, Fran Borgia of Singapore-based Akanga Film Asia, at the Southeast Asia Film Lab at Singapore International Film Festival in 2019. Known for working with leading Singapore talents such as Siew Hua Yeo (Stranger Eyes) and Boo Junfeng (Apprentice), Borgia produced Tan’s short film Strawberry Cheesecake and set up her debut feature as an international co-production.
Producers on the film include Denis Vaslin of the Netherlands’ Volya Films, Antoine Simkine of France’s Les Films D’antoine, Luis Romer of Spain’s Mararía Films and Han Sunhee of Korea’s The Widelog Office. The film received the New Singapore Director grant from Singapore Film Commission, as well as funding from Hubert Bals Fund, Netherlands Film Fund, France’s Cinémas Du Monde and the SFFILM Rainin Grant from the U.S. Bangkok-based sales outfit Diversion is handling international sales.
Tan says she found the four young actresses – Tay, Nicole Lee, Lim Shi-an and Genevieve Tan – through an extended casting call. “None of them have done a feature film before – two had been in short films, and two in theatre. We met a lot of potential actors and the four of them really stood out,” says Tan. “We rehearsed their scenes extensively and had a great working relationship.”
That chemistry between the actresses and with the director can be clearly seen in the film, which has already resulted in a Best Actress win for Tay, who was in Pingyao to accept the award in person.
And it seems the cast and crew of the film will find themselves travelling for some time to come. Upcoming festival screenings include AFI Fest, Hamburg, Bangkok and Taiwan’s Golden Horse film festival and awards, where the film has just been nominated for Best New Director. Several as-yet-unannounced festival slots are expected later in the year.
The post Singapore’s Tan Siyou Talks Teenage Rebels Tackling A Conformist Society In Award-Winning Debut, ‘Amoeba’ – Pingyao appeared first on Deadline.
