The Singaporean filmmaker Tan Siyou has not spent a lot of time at home since his first feature film Amoeba First in the Discovery section of the Toronto International Film Festival.
Since then, the film has screened the Busan Film Festival in the Windows section on Asian Cinema, before spending in Pingyao, where he won three prizes, including the best actress for the performance of Ranice Tay, as well as the jury prize for young people and Cinephilia reviews.
“It was interesting to see how the public in different countries reacts to the film,” said Tan, who grew up in Singapore and moved to Los Angeles after studying the film at Wesleyan University. “In Toronto, we had many people of Asian origin who said that it helped them explain to their compatriots of Canadians how things are back home.
“In Korea, they understood the cultural context, but were curious to know the mixture of languages,” continues Tan. “For us Singaporeans, it is natural to combine several languages in a sentence, but the projection of Busan made me think about showing the film in a homogeneous culture – how would that be found?”
Located in an authoritarian girl school in Singapore, the film follows an unsuitable adolescent (Tay) which attracts the attention of three other girls who also take place against the ultra strict rules of the school – the lengths of hair and skirt measured with a rule and no colored bra strap. The girls become fast friends, who hang out after school in a cave they discovered on a construction site; Meanwhile, two of the girls come across an unexpressed desire for each other while they are trying to film evidence of a ghost.
When the Uncle Phoon, the family driver – played by the Taiwanese veteran, Jack Kao – tells them stories of triad gang which once traversed the streets of Colonial Singapore, the girls decide to form their own gang. But we soon remind them that, in Modern Singapore, such an activity is illegal and could have them expelled from the school.
The dialogue is in a mixture of English and Chinese, which, as Tan noted, is perfectly normal in Singapore – a multicultural society with four official languages, including Tamil and Malays.
Tan, who has already made a short film Strawberry cheese cake Also located in a girl school, says that she wanted to unpack part of the “Chinese of Singapore” in the film-or at least ask how this successful city-state, the richest from Southeast Asia, ended up being so conformist. The girls’ school is called the secondary school of the girls of Confucius, who, as Tan explains, is a bit like a joke.
“When I grew up in Singapore, Confucianism meant respect for the elders and the family, which sounds well. But there is a much darker side to Confucianism which is in fact very patriarchal, ”says Tan. “According to Confucian values, a woman is supposed to have three obeyed in her life – to her father, to her husband and her son. And the girls are not supposed to go to school, so calling her the school of confucing girls is a bit of irony.”
She continues: “But I actually think that Confucian values are subliminally what anchors modern Singapore society. Because people who control society are mainly Chinese, they were colonists and non -Aboriginal in Singapore, and this concept of society being more important than the individual, is really part of Confucianism.”
Tan Siyou
But she adds that it is also the capitalist nature of Singapore that makes it so authoritarian. One of the most developed countries in the world, with the highest per capita GDP in Asia, Singapore began to become rich in the 1970s in the context of government policies that mixed commercial entrepreneurship with borders on democratic freedom.
“At least, my experience at school growing up was that you have to obey, you have to get good grades and go to a good school, otherwise you will not get a good job,” says Tan. “The idea is that you become a productive worker in society and that you continue to feed the capitalist machine. It is therefore this combination of capitalism and confucianism that makes the country so conservative. ”
Anyone who does not enter this machine – triads, activists, labor unions – tends to disappear, explains Tan. Even the song of songs linked to gangs is illegal in Singapore and the authorities have seduced hard on the Triades since the 1980s.
Likewise, anyone who does not become a productive citizen by marrying and having children will also have trouble. Ironically, given its high standard of living, Singapore is not as tolerant of LGBTQ + lifestyles as other nations of Southeast Asia. When the government finally legalized homosexual activity in 2023, it adopted a constitutional amendment to block any debate on homosexual marriage at the same time.
In AmoebaThe attraction between two of the girls is suggested but deliberately not consumed. “I think the film is queer but it’s not opposite. I was more interested in exploring this type of fluidity and training, because they are not yet fully trained, ”explains Tan. “But I think that in Singapore, most of the people who decided that it is what they wanted in their lives, would always note that their partner would not be invited to family gatherings.”
The previous short films of Tan Hello AhmA (2019) and Strawberry cheese cake (2021) Also explore the culture and identity of Singapore and projected in festivals, notably Toronto, Locarno and Berlin. She also twinned with Don Josephus Raphael Eblahan of the Philippines on a short film, Cold cutFor the 2024 edition of Directors Factory, which detected in Cannes.
She met her Amoeba The producer, Fran Borgia of Akanga Film Asia, based in Singapore, at Southeast Asia Lab at Singapore International Film Festival in 2019, known for working with talents from Singapore de Singapore such as Siew Hua Yeo (Strange eyes) and Boo Junfeng (Apprentice), Borgia produced Tan’s short film Strawberry cheese cake And set up his first feature film as an international co -production.
The producers of the film include Denis Vaslin from the Volya films of the Netherlands, Antoine Simkine de France Les films by Antoine, Luis Romer by Mararía Films d’Espagne and Han Sunhee by The Widelog Office of Korea. The film received the new director of Singapore from the Singapore Film Commission, as well as the financing of the Hubert Bals Fund, the Netherlands Film Fund, France Cinemas of the World and the Sffilm Rainin subsidy of derivation of sales outfit based in the United States Bangkok manages international sales.
Amoeba won three prizes in Pyiff, including the best actress for Ranice Tay
Tan says that she found the four young actresses – Tay, Nicole Lee, Lim Shi -An and Geneviève Tan – by an extended extension. “None of them has already made a feature film – two had been in short films and two in theater. We met many potential actors and the four of them really stood out,” said Tan. “We have repeated their scenes a lot and had a big working relationship.”
This chemistry between the actresses and with the director can be clearly seen in the film, which has already resulted in a victory for the best actress for Tay, who was in Pingyao to accept the price in person.
And it seems that the casting and the film team find themselves traveling for a certain time to come. The projections of the upcoming festival include AFI Fest, Hamburg, Bangkok and Taiwan’s Golden Horse Film Festival and Awards, where the film has just been nominated for the best new director. Several festival slots still annual are expected later in the year.
