This director’s weird, wonderful film is censored in her home country
Writer Andy Crump talks to Amanda Nell Eu her debut, "Tiger Stripes," and what Malaysia has to say about it
Zafreen Zairizal as Zaffan in "Tiger Stripes."
Still frame from "Tiger Stripes"
Words by Andy Crump
Ah, adolescence, that tender, delicate time of transition in young peoples’ lives. In certain cases, given a sufficient balance between isolation, repression, and proximity to nature, girls become weretigers, too. (Boys have no such privilege, but they’re animals to begin with, so it’s a wash.) Malaysian filmmaker Amanda Nell Eu’s debut feature, Tiger Stripes, follows this logline to an encouraging, heartfelt end, with a pairing of body horror, folk horror, and coming of age drama.
The greater drama may be rooted in Malaysia itself, where Eu’s film is censored. In a way, this should be expected. Despite prime minister Anwar Ibrahim’s campaign pledges to broaden the country’s civil liberties, Malaysia leans right on the political spectrum, with Tiger Stripes one casualty among many in a recent wave of censorship. If LGBTQ children’s books about appearance and identity, specifically Sarah and Ian Hoffman’s Jacob’s Room to Choose and Rebecca Sugar’s The Tale of Seven, can be yanked from shelves by conservative orthodoxy, then it stands to reason that a film about 12-year-old’s first period is up for grabs, too. Thus, the cut of Tiger Stripes in Malaysian theaters isn’t Eu’s. In short: Don’t watch the film in Malaysia. The film has hit VOD, so you can stream it; Eu’s cut deserves its audience.
Tiger Stripes follows Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal) as she hits puberty before her friends, and starts noticing interloping hairs sprouting on her body, plus an unsightly rash. Her fingernails start sloughing off. Already the wild child in her circle of besties, she grows even wilder. Think Ginger Snaps (2000), John Fawcett’s high school teen werewolf film, filtered through Southeast Asian folklore and constructed using slow cinema techniques. Eu’s work is as recognizable as horror cinema as it is arthouse cinema, and it’s for these reasons that the film won the Critics' Week Grand Prize at Cannes 2023, achieving the honor of being the first Malaysian film to score an award at the most renowned film festival on the planet.
This prestige casts the censorship in a baffling light; you’d think the nation would be jumping at the chance to claim Tiger Stripes as a shining example of Malaysian creative expression. Eu’s exploration of cultural and social constraint has the retroactive effect of predicting the reaction to its critiques of those very constraints by suffering from them; the film is superb on its own merits, but proves especially shrewd, albeit in an altogether painful way, on account of the censoring. I spoke with Eu about the way real life and art collide with each other under these circumstances, and what she ultimately hopes Tiger Stripes will say to a global audience.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
Andy Crump: I understand that the movie, and I'm sure you’ve been asked about this, was censored in Malaysia. I'm an outsider. I’m not familiar with Malaysia's culture and politics. But [rewatching the film], in the back of my head there's a voice going, “Well, of course it got censored.” This is the atmosphere that these children are growing up in. Obviously it sucks. No one wants their movie to be censored. In a weird way, does that kind of prove the movie’s point.
Amanda Nell Eu: [Laughs.] It's so weird, right? When I was making the film, I was so careful too, because I know that we go through censorship, but I'm also having this hope that, come on, they can't really be doing this still, right? It’d be so sad. Then I remember showing the film before we intended to have a theatrical release in Malaysia and showing it all over different parts of the world, people would ask, “Will it be censored?” And I thought, “It’d be so sad if it was censored, because that means that girls and women still don't have a lot of freedom to be themselves and to express themselves fully.” So I kept saying that, and then to go through it, I was reminded that this is really why I made the film.
When you watch the film, it's really showing you what the world, the society, and the cultural politics of Malaysia is right now. This is the reality. What's happening in the film is the reality of what's happening to us as well, as filmmakers. It was weird, but funny as well. I mean, you can only laugh about it. Of course, at the time I was really hurt and upset, and it was also a really strange feeling, because everyone was very excited about the film. It was really celebrated. It was the first film from Malaysia that's ever won an award in Cannes, and people were gearing up to watch it, I said, “No, don't watch it! It's so butchered! Please don't go see it!” [Laughs.]
So weirdly, yeah, it was a repeat of what's truly happening in the film, but at least you people have access to it now because we have streamers and things like that in Southeast Asia as well.
AC: The first time I saw, while [the characters] are recording the dance number in the bathroom, I thought, “Oh my God, this is like [Lukas Moodysson’s ] ‘We Are The Best!’”
ANE: I’ve never seen it!
Although Malaysian film "Tiger Stripes," starring Zafreen Zairizal, won Critics' Week Grand Prize at Cannes 2023, it is banned in Malaysia.
Still frame from "Tiger Stripes"
AC: You’d dig it. [Tiger Stripes] is different from that, but [Zaffa] is a real kid. There are kids who record themselves on TikTok, in this country where that kind of expression is restricted. It made the effect of the film sadder. I imagine that the movie's always, for you, been for those girls; do you feel that even more so now?
ANE: I mean, as a storyteller, you just tell what's in your heart, right? What's honest to you, and then what's fun to you as well. But yeah, these kids, it happens. That's the thing, you go on TikTok in Malaysia as well, or even more conservative countries, and kids are being kids. We have the Internet, we have TikTok, we have YouTube, we have all this access to being curious, and now it's even more like being curious and performing it for the world to see on a screen. It's something that you can't stop. In the story, of course, you have to live this double life. You have to cover it up or hide it and be secretive about it. The whole film is really about fighting to be proud of who you are and be proud of your quirks and your parts of you that people say shouldn't be allowed, or shouldn't be expressed fully.
AC: The other side of the information flow is the story that the girls hear about another girl, Ina, which is obviously a complete boogeyman story put out there to scare them. So it's interesting how there's a double-edged sword quality to that flow, which stuck out to me this time.
ANE: Of course. We all know that social media has so many pros and so many cons. It’s terrifying. That's something that is part of the film; not just to say, “Oh yeah, this is what they do, this is what they read.” It’s also what other people do. There’s also the Dr. Rahim character, who uses social media a lot. He's the other side of the spectrum where this girl is coming from. It’s not all great!
One of the focuses of Amanda Nell Eu’s debut feature, "Tiger Stripes," is friendships.
Still frame from "Tiger Stripes"
AC: Social media could potentially be a benefit for these characters, for Zaffan, but everything gets twisted. She never gets the clarity she needs. That makes the movie scarier in a way; it’s cliché to talk about a horror movie and say, “The real monster is man, or misinformation.” But this thing is happening to her, and if she talks to people about it, she's not going to get a good answer, and she can't get good information from the Internet. Obviously we're talking about metaphor now. Girls don’t hit puberty and turn into weretigers. But where does that leave kids like her?
ANE: That’s exactly what the film is doing. Everywhere she turns, there is nowhere safe for her. There's nowhere that she can ask a question and get real answers or be herself fully. So she obviously goes to nature, right? Which is really part of the fairytale. I’m moving in these spaces of school, and standing in line, and everything's all within this social frame, and then you go to something that's always looming around, and it's something wild, and it's nature, it's the jungle, which isn't the friendliest place sometimes. It’s about how we shoot it as well. It's dark. There's a lot of violence within nature, but that’s just how nature works.
So it's supposed to be complicated. It's supposed to not have any clarity, because that's how we all grow up: Without that much clarity. There is no black and white, everything's gray. I think the only clarity that Zaffan really gets at the end is clarity in herself and clarity that she still has friendship and she has love, she has support in some way or another. So I think that was really the important part of the film: Clarity to know who you are, and to know that there is love out there for you.
AC: I found the contrast between the sensation of scenes at the school versus nature striking. You have a calm, static, aesthetic. The effect at school is stifling. There's so little going on. Everything feels concrete. The jungle is a violent place, but it's so much more alive. Was that an important distinction you were trying to make with your camerawork?
ANE: Yeah, completely. That was definitely all in the work, wanting to make these two spaces very different, and through [Zaffan’s] lens, with elements of magical vibes in the jungle, as well. Whereas the school is meant to be stifling. It's meant to be very constricted, like she can't push out of these boxes that she's been told that she needs to be inside.
In "Tiger Stripes," the strict school environment contrasts with when the characters are in nature.
Still frame from "Tiger Stripes"
AC: You mentioned the fairytale aspect earlier. I tried looking into that. Is there a specific tale that this was based off of?
ANE: So, not necessarily. I think what I love about folk tales, and especially the folk tales that we get from the Southeast Asian region, is that it’s all done through oral tradition initially. There are so many kinds of twists on the same type of monster, and I love that it's not set in stone, the origin story. We don't have a lot of these rules set there. So it’s my take on certain monsters that I love. Of course there’s the weretiger. There's also the Pontianak, which I guess in translation is like a female vampire. There's also the jungle fairies, or the people that you don't see, but they live there. It’s this kind of oral language, which I'm putting out on the screen to a visual language. I think a lot of people in Southeast Asia will recognize and understand a lot of these cues, or these beings at least.
AC: What you just said about oral tradition and there not being a lot of rules is interesting; we're talking about a film that is very much set in a world of rules. There’s an anarchic sensibility in terms of folklore versus the rigid school world. I keep thinking of the principal's speeches to the students, about how it's always Malay students who get in trouble…
ANE: Yeah, she talks a lot of shit.
AC: Yeah! I'm assuming intent here, but that feels like it’s being Trojan Horsed into the movie here.
ANE: Definitely. I mean, that is why the folklore aspect is so wild and so fantastical, but also culturally in Malaysia, there's always this clash of the system of society, and usually a very patriarchal society, clashing with our traditions. Traditions from centuries ago are always at odds with each other, even though people believe in both sides. It’s this complicated way to navigate how we are as people here, especially in Southeast Asia, and I think, obviously, colonialism has a big part to do with that—I'm talking about pre-colonialism and post-colonialism, and how we're always trying to walk on both edges of this sword. Yeah.
AC: What do you hope the reaction will be to the film, for its merits, for a global audience, and how do you hope that that audience will respond to learning that it was censored? I’m sorry to keep rubbing salt in the wound, but at some point I assume a percentage of people who see this will learn about [the censorship]. What do you hope people take away from it as art that was acted upon by the government?
ANE: What actually happened in Malaysia, putting that aside, I think all of us walk around censoring parts of ourselves because we think people will just point and laugh or say that we're hideous, or whatever [laughs], and we’re told to be ashamed of it. So we censor it. [The message is] to not really do that. Don't censor yourself. Know who you are. Find that clarity in who you are and find that love that you are calling out for. That’s basically it. I mean, that's what happened to us when we did find out our film was censored, was to have clarity in who we were and, and make a statement about it, and I think that's important.
Published on July 18, 2024
Words by Andy Crump
Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers movies, beer, music, fatherhood, and way too many other subjects for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours: Paste Magazine, Inverse, The New York Times, Hop Culture, Polygon, and Men's Health, plus more. You can follow him on Bluesky and find his collected work at his personal blog. He’s composed of roughly 65 percent craft beer.