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Singapore, the Netherlands, France, Spain, South Korea / 2025 / 99min
Director：TAN Siyou

Xin Yu, who has transferred to an elite Singapore girls school finds kindred spirits in three outsiders. Exasperated by the school’s hierarchy and strict rules, the four form a gang as a testament to their friendship, filming their mischief and rebellious acts on video. When the school confiscates their camcorder, their footage faces exposure, putting both their friendship and their futures to the test—just as they are on the verge of entering the real world.

Director Tan Siyou’s debut feature is set in a strictly girls school in Singapore and portrays the solidarity of four girls resisting oppressive norms. It follows their questioning of the state-sanctioned idealized national narrative, while also exploring the shifting and unstable nature of adolescent identity. It speaks to us in this time because of how it portrays teenage friendship and solidarity not through romance or boyfriends, but as a collective act of resistance against an authoritarian educational system. The girls’ efforts to escape conformity by reshaping their sense of self are mirrored in the metaphor of the amoeba—an undefined, ever-changing life form. Despite the possibility that they may be pulled apart by differing economic and social realities, the film captures the beauty and difficulty of self-formation with striking clarity. Premiered in the Discovery section at the Toronto International Film Festival, it went on to screen at Busan, Pingyao, and others—winning three awards in Pingyao, including Best Actress.

Director’s statement

This film started from a desire to investigate a story I told myself when I was a teenager—that I was an amoeba. I felt disconnected from my family, school and the society I lived in, and withdrew to survive. To my childish mind, the amoeba—sexless, mindless and alone—was like me, swimming in its own sea.

Growing up, cheerful songs and Good Citizen classes valourized the myth of a sleepy fishing village turned into a modern metropolis. Singapore is a tiny island without natural resources. This was national scripture drilled into us: that the citizens were the key to the nation’s survival. As a young person in school, the education system felt like a training camp. Even the size of my watch and the colour of my bra was policed. And so, to “come-of-age” in this society is not a process of self-discovery, it’s learning to lose your individuality and accept the group identity. Instead of finding my own form in my formative years, the shape was already decided for me. Growing up also meant an endless noise of construction. From grassy fields that become construction sites overnight to old buildings suddenly getting demolished. It meant witnessing my childhood home get turned into a highway. It’s in this context that my characters will crave for what’s hidden beneath the glossy surface of Singapore. A quest for values such as loyalty and honor, buried under the nation’s alluring materialism, together with everything else that could pose a threat to state control.

In school I found the other closet lesbians in detention. We formed a group of close friends, and this is where I’m drawing inspiration for the film from. In our all-girls conservative Chinese school, we considered ourselves brothers more than sisters, rejecting the school’s insistence on grooming us into polite women and dutiful wives. Somehow, there was always a shadow over our friendship, a silent judgement that we were not going to become productive workers or bear children for the country. We were punished endlessly and our friendship made to feel illegal, but at a time when I desired some kind of intimacy, they were my first loves. I feared losing them, and harboured a secret desire to do a gang ritual to seal our brotherhood. Some kind of romantic idea that our bond could be preserved by calling upon something ancient and mysterious.

Amoeba is my way of coping with the loss that came with the burial of my identity in teenhood. I want to explore the possibilities of myth-making and storytelling as identity formation—on a societal, individual, and personal level. If a country has erased its history and replaced it with a doctrinal narrative, how does it affect the psyche and lives of a generation of citizens? How do we, as citizens, make up our own stories to counter the narratives imposed upon us? How, even amongst our closest friends, do we fight to retain our identity and individuality without being subsumed into the group? And how, as a filmmaker, this act of excavating my own past to make this film has connected me even more profoundly with my past and present self.

In the film, the main character uses a camera to evidence that a ghost has been troubling her. Through that, she discovers treasures and things buried with the purpose of being forgotten. I too started to make films to discover and recover things lost. Even now, while I’m digging into the past, ghosts return to haunt me. I recall the sense that the world I live in sits above a wilder, larger, deeper one. A forgotten world whose ghosts are yearning to resurface, demanding to be heard.