Reversal Role

TAN PIN PIN may not be a household name, but the young Singaporean director's star is rising. Her short film, Moving House, won the Academy Award For Best Student Documentary last year, the equivalent of a 'baby Oscar'. And on May 19, the work will be presented at the Kodak Emerging Film-makers' Showcase, part of the Cannes Film Festival. The event, now in its fifth year, is a platform for emerging directors who have earned awards at other important festivals.

At only 33, Tan has been piling up awards, including the Eastman Scholarship for Cinematography (2000) and Discovery Channel's First-time Film-maker's Award (2001). She was also nominated for the Chicago Film-maker Award (2000) and a Golden Reel Award (2000).

Not bad for a lawyer who got into movie-making by accident.

'My life seems to be full of chance encounters,' Tan says, recalling that Moving House was made because she stumbled on to a Discovery Channel competition while surfing the net. 'It was luck, because it wasn't advertised in the US, where I was at the time.'

Indeed, the diffident director also attributes her start in the 'celluloid' world to good fortune. At 19, Tan won a Contax SLR camera in a lucky draw. 'It was a really posh camera, one of those which aren't auto-anything, and in the process of figuring out how to use it, I started taking a lot of photographs,' she says. The win set up a chain of events that led the young law student from taking candid snaps in the street to her first photography exhibition called Friends, Family And Strangers to freelance photo-journalism. But still she continued her studies, 'gently reminded' by her parents. Six months of practising law, however, was enough to convince Tan she hadn't found her true calling. She joined Singapore's MediaCorp as an 'assistant director', hoping to learn how to shoot film, but ended up 'directing traffic' of extras and animals on Singaporean sitcom Under One Roof and drama Growing Up.

'I realised there was just too much I didn't know. I wanted to learn more and make more films, so I applied for and won a scholarship to study for a Master of Fine Arts at Northwestern University in Chicago,' she recalls. The experience opened her eyes to the diversity of film-making. 'I realised there were other ways of seeing things. I always thought there was one kind of film and then when I went there I realised there were a thousand kinds of film,' she admits, referring to features film, documentaries and short-films among others.