With her debut feature “Tiger Stripes,” Malaysian writer-director Amanda Nell Eu joins an exciting group of directors who provide subversive takes on genre and body horror. Julia Ducournau and “Raw” comes to mind, as do Agnieszka Smoczynska and “The Lure” and John Fawcett and “Ginger Snaps” — like David Cronenberg before them.
Eu, an Ma graduate of the London Film School, blends Malaysian folklore with heightened realism and a large dollop of “Mean Girls” in the story of a tween going through changes wrought by puberty and alterations in her friendship group. World premiering at the Cannes Critics Week, it came away with the Grand Jury Prize for best feature and has been collecting additional kudos ever since. It represents Malaysia in the Oscar international feature competition.
Bold 12-year-old Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal) is the natural leader among her group of gal pals, all currently seniors at their religious primary school. She...
Eu, an Ma graduate of the London Film School, blends Malaysian folklore with heightened realism and a large dollop of “Mean Girls” in the story of a tween going through changes wrought by puberty and alterations in her friendship group. World premiering at the Cannes Critics Week, it came away with the Grand Jury Prize for best feature and has been collecting additional kudos ever since. It represents Malaysia in the Oscar international feature competition.
Bold 12-year-old Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal) is the natural leader among her group of gal pals, all currently seniors at their religious primary school. She...
- 12/9/2023
- by Alissa Simon
- Variety Film + TV
Amanda Nell Eu’s feature debut Tiger Stripes is filled with vivid scenes of contemporary girlhood. The film, which won the prize for best feature at the 2023 Cannes Critics’ Week and is Malaysia’s Oscar entry, opens with a giggling trio recording a dance routine. Anyone familiar with the TikTok dance challenges will clock the pattern of these videos. An off-screen voice asks “Okay, ready?” A young girl beams at the camera as she shakes her hips, flicks her wrists and spins. Her rhythm matches the bumping cadence of the electronic dance track playing in the background. Another friend, also off-screen, cheers her on.
Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal), Miriam (Piqa) and Farah (Deena Ezral) are a trio of middle-school girls who break up the monotony of classroom days with brief bathroom conventions. In this space, a private lavatory for the older students in their school, the girls record their videos, gossip,...
Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal), Miriam (Piqa) and Farah (Deena Ezral) are a trio of middle-school girls who break up the monotony of classroom days with brief bathroom conventions. In this space, a private lavatory for the older students in their school, the girls record their videos, gossip,...
- 11/16/2023
- by Lovia Gyarkye
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
“Tiger Stripes,” the debut feature of Malaysian director Amanda Nell Eu, won the Grand Prize at Cannes’ Critics’ Week, the Cannes sidebar dedicated to first or second films. The prize was awarded by a jury presided over by Audrey Diwan, the Venice prizewinning director of “Happening.”
The French Touch Jury Award went to Belgian director Paloma Sermon-Daï’s “It’s Raining in the House,” a film about adolescence, while the Revelation prize from the Louis Roederer Foundation was handed out to Jovan Ginic, the actor of Vladimir Perisic’s “Lost Country.” The Sacd prize, meanwhile, went to “The Rapture” by Iris Kaltenbäck.
“Tiger Stripes” tells the story of Zaffan, a 12 year-old girl who discovers a terrifying secret about her body. Ostracized by her community, Zaffan fights back, learning that in order to be free she must embrace the body she feared, emerging as a proud, strong woman.
The film stars Zafreen Zairizal,...
The French Touch Jury Award went to Belgian director Paloma Sermon-Daï’s “It’s Raining in the House,” a film about adolescence, while the Revelation prize from the Louis Roederer Foundation was handed out to Jovan Ginic, the actor of Vladimir Perisic’s “Lost Country.” The Sacd prize, meanwhile, went to “The Rapture” by Iris Kaltenbäck.
“Tiger Stripes” tells the story of Zaffan, a 12 year-old girl who discovers a terrifying secret about her body. Ostracized by her community, Zaffan fights back, learning that in order to be free she must embrace the body she feared, emerging as a proud, strong woman.
The film stars Zafreen Zairizal,...
- 5/24/2023
- by Elsa Keslassy
- Variety Film + TV
Malaysian director Amanda Nell Eu’s debut about a young girl discovering the truth behind her rebellious nature bristles with supernatural energy thanks to a tremendous young cast
There are some arresting images and bright performances in this bristling debut feature from Malaysian film-maker Amanda Nell Eu, who heads off into a jungle of the mind for a supernatural-realist drama and coming-of-age chiller about the female body and sexuality, with hints of Brian De Palma, David Cronenberg and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It is possibly a little bit derivative and sometimes seems to be treading water in narrative terms, but only after making us submit to a very woozy and hallucinatory experience.
The scene is a Muslim school for girls in Malaysia whose pupils are required to submit to conservative dress and attitudes; in the English language class, they are presented with sentences such as: “The father goes to work. The mother cooks at home.
There are some arresting images and bright performances in this bristling debut feature from Malaysian film-maker Amanda Nell Eu, who heads off into a jungle of the mind for a supernatural-realist drama and coming-of-age chiller about the female body and sexuality, with hints of Brian De Palma, David Cronenberg and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It is possibly a little bit derivative and sometimes seems to be treading water in narrative terms, but only after making us submit to a very woozy and hallucinatory experience.
The scene is a Muslim school for girls in Malaysia whose pupils are required to submit to conservative dress and attitudes; in the English language class, they are presented with sentences such as: “The father goes to work. The mother cooks at home.
- 5/17/2023
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
The universal experience of going through puberty, for any teenager in the midst of it, is basically a first-person body-horror movie — with innocence traded for frightening new powers and one’s changing place in the world painfully up for grabs. Such is the premise of Malaysian writer-director Amanda Nell Eu’s cheekily subversive and vibrantly colorful first feature Tiger Stripes, premiering in Cannes’ Critics Week section on Wednesday.
“When you’re a teenager, you look down at your body one day and suddenly something new and terrifying has happened,” Eu says. “And there are all of those cliches about how teenage girls become so emotional and hysterical that they turn into ‘monsters.’ So, I thought, ‘What if I tell a story about a girl who actually does become a monster’?”
With Tiger Stripes, Eu gives this premise an appealing particularity by rooting the story in rural Malaysia’s traditional folk...
“When you’re a teenager, you look down at your body one day and suddenly something new and terrifying has happened,” Eu says. “And there are all of those cliches about how teenage girls become so emotional and hysterical that they turn into ‘monsters.’ So, I thought, ‘What if I tell a story about a girl who actually does become a monster’?”
With Tiger Stripes, Eu gives this premise an appealing particularity by rooting the story in rural Malaysia’s traditional folk...
- 5/17/2023
- by Patrick Brzeski
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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