A gentle, ambling charmer of a fable with a big heart
The lauded Pop Aye, although somewhat slight, also offers up witty unsentimental social observations.
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POP Aye by Kirsten Tan isn't only the first-ever Singapore movie selected to compete in the Sundance Film Festival at Utah, in what is arguably the world's largest, pre-eminent independent film showcase. It was the prestigious Opening Film for the festival's 2017 World Cinema Dramatic Competition in January, where it premiered to a full house. It went on to win the Special Jury Award for Screenwriting, and then, a month later, it added to that the VPRO Big Screen Award from the International Film Festival Rotterdam in the Netherlands.
The executive producer is Anthony Chen, who had himself made local cinema history with his 2013 Cannes Film Fest prize-winner Ilo Ilo, thereby paving the way for Tan.
Tan, 36, is a Singapore-born, New York-based master's degree graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts with a handful of acclaimed shorts to her name. She spent two gap years in Thailand while in her 20s. And she returned to shoot her Thai-language debut feature, an assured one, entirely on location, using a Thai cast and crew.
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