Countering With Sincerity: A Conversation with Siyou Tan
At last year's QCinema International Film Festival, Javi Villaluz spoke with Singaporean filmmaker Siyou Tan about her films of youth and rebellion.
by Javi Villaluz
Siyou Tan had the idea for her feature-length debut Amoeba (2025) long before its Philippine premiere last year during the 13th edition of the QCinema International Film Festival. It first originated from her liminal youth. Spending her adolescence in her home country of Singapore and later moving to the United States, and seeing how these individual cultures differentiate from one another, has motivated her relationship to depicting identity, societal norms and rebellion.
Amoeba and her previously made short Strawberry Cheesecake (2021) delved into Singaporean identity. How one’s behavior should comply with its mainstream narrative and the subversion of such attitudes that comes after as a way of self-preservation. She mediates the pains of fitting in and counters the hopeless attitude one can have when the world is turned against you through her sincere point-of-view.
In our conversation during QCinema, Tan spoke about the timeline between Amoeba and Strawberry Cheesecake, the influence of filmmaker Tan Pin Pin and alternative Singaporean cinema more generally on her work and outlook, and the spiritual intimacy she felt observing a specific piece of cavern geography in the Philippines while filming a scene for Amoeba.
Javi Villaluz: What was the timeline from making Strawberry Cheesecake to Amoeba?
Siyou Tan: We shot Strawberry Cheesecake around December 2020, we finished in 2021. Actually, I had a script of Amoeba before Strawberry Cheesecake, but it was very bad. I was in a lab and when they read it, I realised what I was trying to express was not on paper, so I decided to throw this film away. I wanted to make a short film, and I still wanted to explore the girls’ school [setting] and [being] the age of 16, so I made a short film, Strawberry Cheesecake, and I feel like after I did that, it sort of made me see things in a different way, and I was able to write Amoeba in a smoother manner.
Regarding alternative cinema in particular, I’ve seen this film, directed by Tan Pin Pin, called To Singapore, With Love (2013)… and I’ve noticed there are many films about Singaporean leftism and counterculture. I was wondering if this particular culture in your country has influenced the way you make films?
Yes, for sure! I think when you’re growing up you’re only exposed to the “right” narrative, unless you are lucky enough to grow up in a family of relatively more intellectual people. For example, one of the actors, [who plays] Sophia (Lim Shi-An), she’s from a family of actors and so her family is much more liberal. My family is very strict. My mom’s from China, very authoritarian, so everything I know then from [family and] school is very much the “right” way of doing things.
I think it was through films, like Tan Pin Pin’s film, [that my perspective changed]. I saw one of her earlier documentaries at an independent film festival, and it opened my eyes. I started to explore. And I think living in the US [influenced my politics]. My American friends are very activist-minded. I was very inspired, because it was the first time I was like “oh you can actually do something about it” and not just be angry about it and feel helpless.
Since you came here to film in the caves in Antipolo for Amoeba, I was wondering if there’s a particular sense of geography that you were searching for in that scene, since it’s a different space entirely from others in the film.
I do feel that the caves feel quite different [from the film’s other locations]. It’s deliberately shot very wide. It’s a very intimate space and it’s very warm, where the rest of the film is a little bit colder. I feel like it’s a physical space but also like a spiritual space, you know. They have to go underground to be away from their parents, to be away from the institutions, and it’s a space where they can be themselves. I think the process of coming here to film made it more special. When I saw the cave, I felt that there’s something very spiritual about it, and the fact that we were all there, with little air, the way they speak is also different, they speak more gently. It’s more intimate and when they’re telling secrets, I feel like they’re really sharing their secrets. We came here, we shot it in one day, with the crew carrying everything up the stairs. It was physically very difficult, but I think you can kind of see it in the final film. I think this cave is amazing, you know, the structures look like teeth or bones or something very ancient.
At the request of the QCinema Critics Lab, what are your favorite films in the whole world?
Hirokazu Koreeda’s After Life
Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl
Lucrecia Martel’s La ciénaga
Pedro Pinho’s I Only Rest in the Storm
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness
Javi Villaluz is a film writer and filmmaker from Quezon City, Philippines. He has been a fellow for critics labs in QCinema, Sphere Festival's Young Critics Program, and has contributed to Southeast Asian film magazine MARG1N.
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