Tan Pin Pin

Professor Tan goes on to point out that "Tan's film points to two stages of violence which are visually resonant. At the first stage, in the 1950s-70s, large numbers of Singaporeans living in village communities were dispersed and resettled-sometimes against their will-into modern public housing estates. In the earlier decades, these mass produced high-rise apartment blocks-though clean,safe and convenient- were criticized for alienating the individual, atomizing community and lacking aesthetic character...... The visual and conceptual resemblance between apartment blocks and columbaria is uncanny, and the film does not miss the opportunity to foreground the irony."

Moving House gives an insight into what it is like for one of the 55,000 families in Singapore forced to relocate the remains of their relatives from a cemetery to a columbarium.

In her first year at Oxford, she came across photography books, including Robert Frank's The Americans (1958) and August Sander's Citizens of the Twentieth Century (1986), and started taking photographs.

Tan Pin Pin (, born 1969) is a Singapore-based film director.

After graduation in 1991, she travelled to China with her camera.

Kenneth Paul Tan of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy states that "Pin was at the start of a trend among a younger generation of filmmakers to use film to examine and maybe even interpret the past, motivated by a sense of loss coming from how quickly Singapore has evolved."

Her films have screened at festivals including Berlin, Busan, Cinéma du Réel, Visions du Réel, Rotterdam and at the Flaherty Seminar.

They have also screened on Discovery Channel.

In Singapore, they have received sold-out screenings, toured schools and was acquired by Singapore Airlines for their in-flight entertainment services.

Her video installations have been shown in the President's Young Talent Show, Singapore Art Show and the Aedes Gallery in Berlin.

She has won or been nominated for more than 20 awards.

According to Twitchfilm's Stefan, watching Invisible City "made you think, about existentialism, about memories, about immortality."

Moving House (1997) was about the exhumation of Tan's great-grandparents' grave in 1995.

The site was off Sixth Avenue in Singapore.

This was the first of three documentaries about grave exhumations.

Tan's microwave takes a humorous jab at the world's obsession with everybody's favourite plastic doll.

The film was done in a single shot and has screened in multiple festivals around the world.

The 2001 short Rogers Park is a snapshot of the lives of three people – a man, a woman, and a boy.

They live under one roof and yet in emotionally separate spaces in Chicago's Rogers Park.

Rogers Park was a Student Academy Awards Regional Finalist, won the Golden Reel Award and the Chicago Filmmaker Award.

It also screened at the Clermont Film Festival in France.

Tan was on the Board of The Substation (2004–2011) and was also on the Board of the National Archives of Singapore (2007–2009).

Tan, with Yuni Hadi, co-founded the Fly by Night Video Challenge which has seen several hundred short films made in the seven years it was run.

She has been on film juries of Cinemanila International Film Festival, Jeonju International Film Festival, and DMZ Docs amongst others.

She is best known for the documentary film Singapore GaGa (2005).

It was the first Singaporean documentary to have a theatrical run.

Kenneth Paul Tan states that "Raphaël Millet describes Northwestern University-trained Tan Pin Pin as a 'pioneer' of the documentary genre in Singapore and country, her 22-minute Moving House among the 'first breakthroughs'in a genre that is important for recording the history of 'a young nation still in the making'...... In Singapore GaGa (2005) for instance, Tan captures and then privileges the marvelous diversity, idiosyncrasies and musicality of ordinary voices in Singapore, voices that have mostly been overpowered by the ubiquitous and bland pronouncements of officialdom"

Singapore GaGa, voted the Best Film in 2006 by The Straits Times, is described as "one of the best films about Singapore".

Moving House, Pin Pin's thesis film for her Northwestern University MFA, won the Student Academy Award for Best Documentary.

Other awards include two Asian Television Awards, Cinéma du Réel's Prix de la SCAM and Taiwan International Documentary Festival's Asian Vision Award.

Her films are distributed by Objectifs Films.

She recently completed Yangtze Scribbler and thesaurus.

She was on the team in 2011 that lobbied the Singapore Film Commission to include documentaries and films with artistic and cultural merit in the New Talent Feature Grant Scheme.

In 2014, her documentary To Singapore, With Love (2013) was denied for all ratings by the Media Development Authority, effectively banning it in Singapore.

The oldest of three girls, Tan was born to architects in a middle-class neighborhood.

Educated at Raffles Girls' Secondary School and Victoria Junior College, Tan was a Loke Cheng Kim scholar.

She received her first degree in law from Oxford University, graduating with an M.A. in England, United Kingdom.

Subsequently, she received her MFA in film and television from Northwestern University.

2015 will see the release of Tan's short film as part of an omnibus to commemorate Singapore's 50th year of independence.

Tan Pin Pin is a founding member of filmcommunitysg, a collective of independent filmmakers in Singapore.