On The Road

Like the majestic elephant ambling across Thailand in Pop Aye, her Sundance-winning debut feature, Singaporean filmmaker kirsten tan is enjoying her cinematic journey.

- Zara Zhuang

SINGAPOREAN FILM DIRECTOR and cinematographer Kirsten Tan wasn’t ready to come home in 2006. After a year-long artist-in residency programme at the Asian Young Filmmakers Forum in South Korea, the Ngee Ann Polytechnic film alum found herself in Thailand, where she ran a t-shirt stall in Chatuchak market and spent two years bunking in friends’ homes from Chiangmai to Bangkok. To the 32-year-old, living like a rover was a liberating experience that wore down the rigidity with which she had been raised. “In my early 20s, I was a total free spirit,” Tan says. “I had no idea what the future would bring, but I was young and unafraid.”

Fast-forward a decade and her “future” is looking a lot brighter. Not only was Tan’s debut feature, Pop Aye, selected from about 4,000 international submissions to open the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at January’s Sundance Film Festival, the 102-minute film also went on to win the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Screenwriting — making Tan the first Singaporean feted at the independent film festival. Pop Aye is slated to premiere on local screens this month and will be distributed in North America by New York–based film company Kino Lorber.