Siyou Tan’s debut feature film Amoeba was born out of the need to explore identity formation in Singapore, a young nation full of contradictions. It also gave her a way to reflect on her teenage years, her feelings of otherness and repression she felt in school, and on the intense, intimate friendships that teenage girls form in rebellion and solace.
At an elite girl’s secondary school in Singapore, returning student Choo Xin Yu’s (Ranice Tay) reputation for trouble precedes her. But despite her outsider status, she forms a rag-tag friendship group with her fellow final year classmates Vanessa (Nicole Lee), Sofia (Shi-an Lim) and Gina (Genevieve Tan).
The four quickly become inseparable and also strike up an unlikely bond with Sofia’s family driver, Uncle Phoon (Jack Kao). In their search for self-discovery and understanding as teenage girls, they are drawn to Uncle Phoon’s stories of being part of a gang and seek to form their own gang.
Ahead of its World Premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, we caught up with Siyou to discuss the long journey towards Amoeba, commiserate over shared experiences at elite all-girls’ schools in Singapore, teenage friendships, and the women filmmakers that influenced her.
One of your short films, Strawberry Cheesecake (2021), is also about rebellious teenage girls. From my experience working at the Asian Film Archive in Singapore and previous screenings of the film, it is quite popular with audiences. Did making Strawberry Cheesecake influence the conceptualisation of Amoeba?
Thank you for your question and hearing about how Strawberry Cheesecake is popular. In a way, I had been working on Amoeba since 2018. Because it is quite personal, the early drafts of it felt too autobiographical, too diaristic. I was really stuck on the script. Then the pandemic hit, and I thought I’d never make a film again. So I thought of making a short film, and looked around for some grants.
[For Strawberry Cheesecake], I managed to get funding from *SCAPE [a Singaporean NFP which presents the Singapore Youth Film Festival], and you had to choose a genre for your short film to be in. In light of the pandemic and all the craziness happening in the world, I chose horror. I’m not sure why, since my script was initially a drama and it was about rebellious teenage girls and about a vape that explodes.
Image still from Strawberry Cheesecake (2021, Tan Siyou)
Working on horror [with Strawberry Cheesecake] actually made me question what my biggest fear is. On the surface, I do fear a lot of things, but on a deeper, emotional, psychological level, what did I really fear? So in the process of working on the short film, it managed to unlock the writing on this feature film. The writing for Amoeba was able to become more fictionalised [from the initial concept], from the setting to the characters, and the writing became a lot smoother after that.
I did observe that the film has a diaristic quality, especially with the camcorder footage. This made me wonder if there were any scenes or plots you wrote or even shot that you ended up editing out just because of length or they didn’t flow with the rest of the film?
In fictionalising it, [the film] became less autobiographical and more focused on the three friends and fleshing them out more clearly in opposition to [Xin Yu]. For example, the Sofia character became an amalgamation of a lot of richer friends that I had, that showed you exciting things and were very generous and opened their house to you. Each of these characters could become fuller, because they were made up of so many other people.
I think what was missing in the initial script was a narrative structure, which I managed to find through [writing it as] the final graduating year, along with the camcorder footage and the gang elements… But even in the editing process, there were many scenes that I loved that were sadly cut.
Another thing I really liked about the film was the conflict between the four girls and how it slowly simmered and then bubbled to the surface. One of the reasons for the friction is because of class/economic differences. In school, you seem equal, but in the bigger fabric of society, there is a berth between someone like Sofia (who lives in a bungalow with a driver like Uncle Phoon and whose mother carries luxury handbags), compared to Gina and Xin Yu, who have more ordinary, middle-class backgrounds. Was this a theme you wanted to highlight in writing these characters?
I think to be truthful in making a Singapore film, we have to talk about money and wealth. I grew up in a middle-class family, and as you go about life, you suddenly come to have a friend with a really big house. And that’s also part of the coming of age for me, that you realise that different people are treated differently in life: based on what you have, what your last name is, and where you live. That’s the rude shock of growing up in the world, and it is the same everywhere. I grew up in Singapore, but now I live in America, and it’s the same. There are certain privileges given to certain kinds of people. For example, as a rebellious girl growing up with a group of friends, I was always the one who was being singled out and punished. But I had a friend who was very protected and nothing ever happened to her.
The four girls enjoying high tea in Sofia’s bungalow with Sofia’s mother (Janice Koh)
My parents were very authoritarian and controlling, and having privileged friends acted as a foil in my life, where I would observe that they were friendly with their parents in a way that was strange to me. They would talk about their friends and feelings with their parents in a way I couldn’t imagine. For example, once I was talking to my mother in Mandarin, and told her about my friend, and she replied, “I’m not your friend, I’m your mother, and you need to remember that.”
For the Sofia character, I had to carefully build [her]. There’s a certain type of admiration and respect you have for that type of person. They are very shiny, and they bring a lot of exciting things into your life. And with female friendships, especially with a group setting, there are different dynamics, and power imbalances with this type of character, where they might be doing messed-up things that you don’t agree with.
Personally watching the film, I identified with a lot of it since I was also from an all-girls’ school with many privileged girls. I also experienced a lot of these very intense friendships and was part of these friend groups where you can feel and observe the class differences and power imbalance.
I have three sisters and most of my friends are women. In teenhood, adulthood, and in my whole life, most of my important relationships are with women. For me, this group of girls was interesting because so much is left unsaid between them—there’s feelings of jealousy, of possession… you don’t feel understood, but then you also feel very understood… It’s very complicated.
One thing I noticed was that within this group all the four girls had different and unique relationships with each other. It’s subtle but well-defined. So I wondered how you came to write the characters of Xin Yu, Gina, Vanessa and Sofia and the different dynamics in the group?
That was really a lot of the work I had to do with the writing. Solidifying each of the characters and solidifying each of their relationships. The interesting thing for me was the triangulation of the four. When three of them hang out with each other without one, what is the dynamic? How does it change if one of them is missing?
In the writing, I had to be very clear who [Xin Yu] is, and what her different relationships with each of the three girls are. Because even in my own friend groups, the way we relate to each other is very different.
For Gina and Xin Yu, to me, that relationship was very clear, but when I went to [script-writing] labs internationally, I was told it wasn’t, but basically these two are best buddies and do scrappy things together. I think for Xin Yu and Vanessa, it was a lot easier for people to understand—it was like a love story, but also an anti-love story in a way. They have an attraction to each other based on something mysterious, and they are also connected by this ghost . It is this type of secondary school attraction that gets super intense and then goes nowhere.
I guess it became easier to write [the characters] once I detached myself from who they were initially based on, and then they became characters, rather than my friends.
You brought up the ghost. Throughout the film Xin Yu believes her room might be haunted, and bonds with Vanessa over capturing the ghost on Sofia’s camcorder. Going back to how Strawberry Cheesecake was in the horror genre, but it is so entirely different from the haunting element in Amoeba. What made you choose to add in the element of a possible haunting surrounding Xin Yu’s character? Was it related to her identity as an outsider?
Fear is something I can relate to. I’m very fascinated but also very scared of ghosts, of things that I cannot see but I know are there. There was a ghost in my childhood bedroom, especially between my secondary two and four years [ages 14-16]. When I told my mother about it, she just ignored me, and said there was no such thing. That was a big moment for me personally, because I realised that if I can’t turn to my mother for comfort for something that was so scary to me, what else can I do?
In school, I told one friend, and they told another friend, and in the end my friends came together to comfort me and gave me things to protect myself with. So now I had an arsenal of tools to face the ghost in my room. That feeling always stayed with me—wondering about why the ghost chose me. Did I do something wrong?
In working on this film, the ghost was important, because it was a turning point for Xin Yu to turn away from her family and towards her friends. I was asked a lot about the ghost—what did it look like? Does it have a shape? I could never see the ghost, but I knew it was there. I could feel it very strongly. So the ghost can also be a metaphor, an externalisation of Xin Yu’s outsider nature, what sets her apart from everyone else. The ghost therefore acts as a figurative, metaphysical element for her state of mind and emotions.
Amoeba follows a long history of ‘girl gang’ films or films about intense close-knit female friendships. Did any of these types of films influence the making of Amoeba, or did other forms of media influence it?
I know there is a long history of girl gang films in Japan, but I didn’t watch any of them. There was just one picture that I looked at and liked a lot. It was of these sukeban [Japanese teenage girl gang members] in the 60s and 70s, black and white, very fuzzy, and this group of girls looked really badass and I liked it. But for films, I did not watch them because it seemed to me that the girls might be sexualised for commercial interest, which I am against.
Image still from Girlhood (2014, Céline Sciamma)
Girlhood by Céline Sciamma and Alice Rohrwacher has this film called The Wonders that were influences. So I guess I wasn’t that much influenced by girl gang films, but more with coming-of-age films. I also like Lucretia Martel a lot. I do gravitate towards female filmmakers and how they portray not just girls, but also boys. They’re just people in their films, and not sexualised.
I read a lot, and literature-wise, I like Kazuo Ishiguro. Never Let Me Go, with the clones, in a way, was a bit of an influence. Not directly, but in that there’s this setting which is real, but also feels surreal. Sometimes I feel like Singapore is a bit of an experiment. We are such a young country, and it feels like our generation is being experimented on to see what works best, what happens when different combinations are put together.
Now that you mention the surreal, it makes me think of the final stretch of the film, and of the Jack Kao character, who seems like such an otherworldly character in the story because he’s so wise. And also, Jack Kao is quite a big deal in Asian cinema if you know who he is, so there’s that metatextual element. So I was wondering how he ended up playing the character of Uncle Phoon?
When I started Amoeba, there was only the title, and the girl gang element. So how do I flesh out a story from these two elements? There needs to be a realistic introduction to gang culture. With these elite girls’ schools, there’s not going to be a lot of exposure to gangs, so how do they organically come across gang culture? I thought, oh, what if I could strengthen Sofia’s character and what I wanted to say about the class differences with Uncle Phoon being part of her life. So besides the camcorder that she brings to the girls, she also brings Uncle Phoon into their lives. I also wanted to comment a little on how Sofia’s money is also dirty, that maybe Sofia’s construction company father had dealings with gangs.
Jack Kao as Uncle Phoon in Amoeba
I didn’t want Uncle Phoon to be a typical violent gangster, because violence is not what these girls are looking for. They want agency and freedom, and they want an adult to see them as who they are, not to instruct them to become good girls and good wives. So Uncle Phoon became the only adult figure that they can hang out with who doesn’t treat them like children to be moulded. In Singapore, in a lot of these [privileged] families, I think a lot of the people that work for you end up becoming closest to you, like the domestic helpers in your household. Sofia’s house became the hangout spot for the girls, and when they wanted to go places, Uncle Phoon would take them [as their driver], and naturally he would become their friend.
The casting of Uncle Phoon had to be thoughtful. Looking within Singapore, I was initially thinking of casting Xie Shaoguang, because he’s a monk, and I think he’s a good actor. But he wasn’t acting anymore. So my producer Fran [Borgia] told me to think bigger, to think outside Singapore. And the person I really wanted was Jack Kao, because I wanted to play a bit with his persona and roles. In Millennium Mambo and other Hou Hsiao-Hsien films, he plays a gangster with a tender heart, and that’s what I wanted for this character. So we reached out, and he was interested. He came down to film, and it was a lot of fun. I think Uncle Phoon has to be sincere, but also detached. He’s a badass who could kill you, but he’s also driving you around.
Can you talk about the locations in which you shot the film since another surrealistic element of the film are the cave scenes, which are very atmospheric. I figured the cave scenes were the scenes shot in the Philippines from the credits.
Locations are always difficult with Singapore, and I guess I did write some things which were quite difficult to find in Singapore, like the construction site, the cave, and even the school. The school was an abandoned school—it’s the former Raffles Girls’ School location [an elite all-girls school]. That was good because it was really big and we didn’t have to work around any school schedules.
There are some caves in Singapore, but I tried everything and went to every authority to even get permission to scout the caves, but it was not allowed. When something like that happens, you think, oh, can we cut the cave scenes? But I thought about what is really important to this film, and to me, the cave scenes are the heart of the film. If there’s no cave, there’s no film. The cave was important because it was the girls going literally underground to have this space that acts like a gang den.
On our crew, the AD team and the production designer are Filipino. The second AD also happened to be a producer, and she thought maybe she could help produce this scene in the Philippines. It turns out it was feasible, and so we went to the Philippines to shoot the cave scenes.
It looks like it was perfect because besides the vibe, which is right for the story, it’s a huge space, which is practical for filming purposes.
It’s really big, and the place in the cave where we shot the girls doing the gang ritual, the locals called it ‘the cathedral’. During Holy Week, lots of people come into that space to [conduct] mass, and it made me feel better in a way, because I don’t want to desecrate a cave. But this cave is a place where people come to and there’s a feeling of worship there. It’s actually a private cave that someone owns.
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You can next catch Amoeba at the Busan International Film Festival 2025 as part of the A Window on Asian Cinema program.
The above interview has been edited for clarity and length.