Amoeba

Official Selection, 2025 Toronto International Film Festival
Official Selection, 2025 Busan International Film Festival
Best Actress, 2025 Pingyao International Film Festival

In a word, Choo Xin Yu is “ungovernable.” The newest student at a Singapore prep school for girls, she quickly joins a circle of outsiders. Their ambition: to become a gang. While they begin with trespassing on construction sites and making raunchy school plays, they soon set their sights higher. Just like the opium profiteers who founded Singapore, Choo Xin Yu argues, why not become drug dealers?

Rebellious students are among cinema’s most iconic outlaws. Think of Better Luck Tomorrow, Battle Royale, Zéro de Conduite. School is the place where young people are most coercively shaped into subjects, and where the violation of even a small rule, say your hair touching your collar, threatens the whole system. When Choo Xin Yu and her gangster girlfriends buck this system, it puts their friendship and loyalty directly in the path of privilege and power.

The short film Strawberry Cheesecake, directed by Siyou Tan, was an electrifying festival favorite at SDAFF 2021. AMOEBA is Tan’s feature debut. With it she raises the stakes, making a film just as incisive about the history of Singapore as it is about its charismatic and vulnerable heroines.

– Lev Kalman