By Christopher Vourlias
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Singaporean filmmaker Tan Siyou presents her debut feature, “Amoeba,” this week at Venice Production Bridge’s Gap-Financing Market. The film is produced by Fran Borgia of Singapore’s Akanga Film Asia (“Tiger Stripes”), who is on the Lido with Yeo Siew Hua’s Golden Lion nominee “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 other misfits. As they take over the hallways and classrooms with their bumbling attempts at gangsterism, the film explores the price of societal and cultural expectations Singapore places on its citizens and the pressure to conform in the repressive city-state.
In an interview with 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.
