Amanda Nell Eu’s Tiger Stripes is selected in Cannes Critics’ Week

Directed by Amanda Nell Eu and produced by Foo Fei Ling, Ghost Grrrl Pictures‘s Tiger Stripes is named the grand prize winner for best feature at Cannes Critics’ Week, becoming the first Malaysian film to receive the honour. Founded in 1962, Cannes Critics’ Week is an esteemed parallel section of the Cannes Film Festival dedicated to empower the young talents in cinema.

The Malay-language coming-of-age horror revolves around Zafreen Zairizal’s Zaffan, a 12-year-old girl whose struggles to navigate the beginning of adolescence is fueled by her body changes and the distancing from her own community, and eventually leads to her self-discovery.

In an interview with Variety, Eu revealed that “A big inspirational point of this film is folktales and fairy tales. We have a lot of these kind of horror-folk tales in Southeast Asia.” She further shared with Variety, “Fairy tales talk a lot about patriarchal authority. And so, the way I talk about the adults in the film is very much from the child’s point of view. The adults in the school are almost caricatures. That was how I felt as well, when I was a kid. You don’t see teachers as human beings. You see them as these authoritative figures.”

 Tiger Stripes will be shown on the big screen in Malaysia in the near future.