Tan Pin Pin
Director
19
Movies
0
TV Shows
Tan Pin Pin is an award-winning Singapore film director who has spent over two decades chronicling her country’s history, memory and representation in thoughtful and self-reflexive works that have screened theatrically in Singapore and abroad. Her works have been invited to key film festivals: Berlinale, Busan, Hot Docs, SXSW, Visions du Reel and at the Flaherty Seminar. Nearer home, they have been presented at M+, Parasite, CUHK, Rumah Attap, Sa Sa Art Projects, on Singapore Airlines, Jakarta Biennale and on Netflix.
Her work has been honoured with mid-career retrospectives at RIDM in Montreal, Liberation Docfest in Bangladesh and Dok Leipzig. Pin Pin started her career in the arts as a photojournalist. When video cameras became more affordable, she made the leap to the moving image after being moved by Taiwanese auteur’s Hou Hsiao Hsien’s City of Sadness. Inspired, she made her first film, Moving House (1996) using borrowed cameras. It is about the exhumation of her great-grandparent’s graves and their remain’s subsequent move to a columbarium. The film got her her first film job as an assistant director for the police drama, Triple Nine, and latterly, a scholarship to study film at Northwestern University, USA. Her graduation film won a Student Academy Award.
Upon her return to Singapore, she made Singapore GaGa (2005) a film about Singapore’s soundscape. It was described as “One of the best films about Singapore” by the Straits Times. It became the first Singapore documentary to have an 8-week sold-out theatrical run. Meanwhile, the citation for the award from Cinema du Reel for Invisible City (2007), her next film, reads, “A witty, intellectually challenging essay on history and memory as tools of civil resistance”. Her short film Pineapple Town (2015), one of seven in the 7 Letters omnibus, was Singapore’s entry to the Oscars. Meanwhile, To Singapore, with Love (2013), a film about Singapore political exiles was banned by Singapore’s censors for undermining National Security. IN TIME TO COME (2017), her next film is an immersive film about Singapore rituals like fire drills and mosquito fogging sessions.
Behind the Camera
朔风-破阵子
Director
Crossings: John Woo
Director, Escritor, Productor
7 Letters
Director, Escritor
星国恋
Director, Escritor, Dir. de Fotografía
备忘录
Director
Singapore GaGa
Director
In Time to Come
Director
孺子不可教
Productor Ejecutivo
Thesaurus
Director
走走
Director
Rogers Park
Director
Moving House
Director
Snow City
Director
Moving House
Escritor, Director
The Impossibility of Knowing
Director
Microwave
Director
Yangtze Scribbler
Director