Singaporean filmmaker Tan Siyou will be presenting her first feature, “Amoeba,” this week at the Venice Production Bridge’s Gap-Financing Market. It’s produced by Fran Borgia of Singapore’s Akanga Film Asia (“Tiger Stripes”), who’s on the Lido with Yeo Siew Hua’s Golden Lion contender “Stranger Eyes.”
“Amoeba” follows a 16-year-old dropout who sparks a rebellion when she returns to her elite all-girls school and starts a gang with three fellow misfits. As they take over the halls and classrooms with their clumsy attempts at being gangsters, the film explores the price of the societal and cultural expectations Singapore places on its citizens and the pressure to conform in the repressive city-state.
Speaking to Variety ahead of the Venice Film Festival, Tan said her debut is an exploration of the “paradox” of her homeland, a country that is “open but narrow-minded, Westernized but rooted in Eastern collectivism,” and whose post-independence “economic miracle” transformed the island nation from a sleepy fishing village into a prosperous modern state.
While those who reaped the gains of that transformation were reluctant to rock the boat and willing to compromise certain freedoms in exchange for material comforts, their children — Tan’s generation — “had to conform to their recipe for prosperity,” said the director, “never allowed to question” the structures behind the miraculous economic success.
That indoctrination, she said, begins at an early age. “The schools are an instrument to propagate this system and to mold the kind of ‘good’ citizens that were preferred,” Tan explained. “The specific school I went to was very academically focused, but also very strict. This disciplinarian approach and culture of conformism was accepted by everyone because all through our lives we sang songs about putting the society before self. Because what is good for the nation, is also good for us.”
That philosophy, she said, permeated her schooling, with Orwellian courses like a Good Citizen Class among those she was required to take. “It was an expectation on us, that we are inheriting this system and we had to continue propping it up by being efficient workers, and for girls — good wives and mothers,” she said. “It felt like a training camp because instead of finding my own form in my formative years, the shape has already been decided for me.”
As the director got older, she began to understand “the machinery behind the control exerted in school, a control that seeps into something as intimate as my friendships,” she said. “The punitive laws of society, just like the stringent rules in school, are used to ensure obedience, to control citizens’ behavior and restrict our desire to express ourselves. Punishments are always justified in the name of economic growth and social harmony.”
Tan, who is based in Los Angeles, said she “harbored a secret desire to study film” when she left Singapore but considered it a “distant dream.” Attending Wesleyan University, where she received a degree in art and film, and later during a directing fellowship at the American Film Institute, she discovered “a freedom of thought, a freedom to love, and…soaked up this spirit of possibility.”
“Being in a dark room with strangers watching the same projected light and sound makes me feel close to other people. It’s this very special kind of intimacy that made me want to become a filmmaker,” she said.
Writing the script for “Amoeba” has helped Tan “unlearn many narratives and confront the repression in my teenhood,” she said. “It has become a process of excavating things that I’ve buried. I didn’t know it, because I’ve always sought the safety of being hidden, but behind the camera, I’m also somehow in front of it.”
Borgia described Tan as a “rare filmmaker” and said it was clear that he would help her make her debut film when they met five years ago.
“I don’t choose projects based on their merits alone; I select the people I work with,” the producer told Variety. “I was initially drawn to Siyou as a filmmaker and her potential, rather than any specific story. However, as she shared more about the story behind ‘Amoeba’ and its significance to her, I became deeply engaged.
“I thrive on challenges, and this project presents a significant one,” he continued. “Securing financing for a first-time female director with a deeply personal and unconventional story is no easy feat, but that’s exactly what drew me to it. The journey has been tough but incredibly rewarding, and we’re just getting started.”