Teen misfit to Golden Horse winner: How Singapore’s Tan Siyou turned rebellion into new film Amoeba

SINGAPORE – A rule in storytelling is to write what you know, so Tan Siyou chose to make her first feature film based on what she knew: life as a teenage misfit.

The United States-based Singaporean writer-director, who is in her 30s, says that her report slips contained words such as “poor”, “lazy” or “never applies herself” in the conduct section.

At her top-ranked all-girls secondary school which she declines to name, she says she became a target for disciplinary action, unlike her more well-behaved classmates who embodied the institution’s Confucian values that taught that girls ought to be demure and obedient.

Respectful girls did not slouch, but she did it anyway, she tells The Straits Times in an interview at a Luckin Coffee outlet at Junction 8 mall on March 4.

“I looked like I was asleep in class, but I’m listening, I’m paying attention, it’s just that my head is down,” she says.

Those experiences and others, such as forming a tight friend group, are in Amoeba, a coming-of-age drama that Tan wrote and directed. It opens in Singapore cinemas on March 26.

The film takes place in a fictitious elite all-girls school in Singapore and features a cast of local actresses in the lead roles.

Choo (Ranice Tay) chafes against the school’s many rules, which earns her the admiration and friendship of students Vanessa (Nicole Lee), Sofia (Lim Shi-An) and Gina (Genevieve Tan).

They become obsessed with triad culture and decide to define themselves as a gang. Even as they try to discover who they want to be – like an amoeba, they are formless – their parents, school and Singapore’s education system have already decided what they must become. Finding their real identities will require questioning the stories they have been fed from birth.

In 2025, at Taiwan’s Golden Horse film awards, Amoeba won the out-of-competition FIPRESCI Prize, awarded by the International Federation of Film Critics, and Taiwan Film Critics Society Award.

In the same year, at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards in Australia and at Pingyao International Film Festival in China, it won Best Youth Film and the Youth Jury Award respectively. And at the QCinema International Film Festival in the Philippines, it was named Best Film in the New Horizons section.

Amoeba is a co-production led by Singapore’s Akanga Film Asia, working with production companies from the Netherlands, France, Spain and South Korea. It also received funding from the Singapore Film Commission.

Film’s characters based on Tan’s friends

The film’s core quartet is inspired by her own friend group from school, who still keep in touch. Tan says they helped create a rowdy atmosphere, laughing at the local references and shared history, when Amoeba screened at the 2025 Singapore International Film Festival.

They bonded at school because, like her, they were tomboys and labelled “good for nothing” by teachers.

Tan’s academic performance was adequate, she says. Her studying style was to “grab the Buddha’s leg”, using the Chinese idiom to describe eleventh-hour cramming, then praying for the best.

After junior college (she declined to reveal which one she attended), she enrolled in Wesleyan University in Connecticut, in the US. After a year of taking economics at the small liberal arts school, she had had enough. She switched to film studies and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in the subject in 2012.

Going through with economics and becoming a banker – a wish her parents had held for her – would have led her to a mental breakdown by age 40, Tan says.

Proximity to Hollywood

She lived in Los Angeles to be near the film industry, taking on jobs like graphic design and bartending, eventually getting her green card. She completed a directing fellowship at the American Film Institute.

She is now based in New York – where the indie film-making scene is more vibrant compared with Los Angeles – though she returns to Singapore regularly to work on commercials and other projects. She directed the short film Red Plastic Chairs On Sticky Floors, one of six in the 2025 Kopitiam Days anthology made to celebrate SG60.

Amoeba was filmed in late 2024, using locations such as the former Raffles Girls’ School campus in Anderson Road for the corridor and classroom scenes, and a Housing Board flat for scenes set in Choo’s home.

Tan chose a playground in Bishan as the background for ST’s photo shoot because it reflected Choo’s upbringing and her own, where, for a time when she was a child, her family lived in an HDB flat.

The on-screen teenagers are played by full-time actresses in their mid- to late-20s, with all having backgrounds in theatre or short films. Lee is also a screenwriter at Mediacorp.

Tan says her team tried casting real teenagers and even approached girls on the streets – using the “hey, do you want to be in a movie?” approach – but ran into problems.

“When I was in secondary school, I hung out at shopping malls or on the streets. But teenagers are not there now. We couldn’t find them anywhere. I think they are now all online, on their iPads,” she says.

‘Futile casting teenagers’

Even after finding her young cast, Tan ran into the problem of parents who objected after discovering that a feature film takes weeks, not days, to shoot. Teen years are also examination years, she was reminded, and potential actors dropped out to focus on studies.

“It was futile casting teenagers. Also, they don’t have the emotional vulnerability that people in their 20s have. It takes time for that kind of reflection to occur,” she says.

She believed that her eventual line-up had the training and talent to pull it off – and she was proven right.

To be the teens whom Tan envisioned, they had to reflect the messiness of being one in the tropical heat of Singapore. Next, they had to embody the goofiness that can ensue when high-spirited girls are free to be themselves, away from the supervision of adults.

“I wanted to show that girls are very dirty. They are sweaty. They are reckless. They are far from being the polished and refined girls the school wants them to be,” she says.

An unexpected rainstorm during filming gave Tan an idea to put both aspects of teenage girlhood on display.

“It was raining so heavily that we couldn’t film the outdoor scene. So, we were just in the school corridors and I told them, ‘Okay, just goof around.’ And they were just being themselves, but in character. And that’s when you see that intimacy, that frisson that I was looking for. It’s not something you can write. It’s something they have to feel,” she says.

Amoeba reflects Tan’s thoughts not just about the stifling environment in school, but also socio-economic class in Singapore, a place where an English speaker’s grammar, vocabulary and accent come loaded with markers of status.

She calibrated the use of English and Mandarin to reflect the girls’ backgrounds, so that Choo’s English would indicate her Chinese-language upbringing, while others with a more privileged upbringing would speak it differently.

“There’s snobbery in Singapore, a colonial hangover. If you speak good English, you are of a higher class. My family spoke Mandarin at home, so we were seen as heartlanders,” she says.

Some might say Amoeba tells the story of girls clashing with a system that feeds indoctrination along with education, but Tan prefers to call it a story about a teenager trying to be as true to herself as possible. That search for truth, as seen in the character of Choo and in Tan herself as a teenager, is classified as making trouble for others, she says.

“I try to face everything with a certain kind of honesty. And in the system, honesty becomes rebellion. Why? It’s perverted. I’m just trying to be honest, but others will frame it as rebellion.

“To connect with something deeper within yourself, sometimes you have to disobey what’s expected of you.”