Street Survivors

On the cultural oxymoron scale, the idea of a "Singaporean punk" weighs in somewhere between "Chinese democrat" and "Texan pacifist." Singapore is supposedly the air-conditioned Eden, as neat and ordered as the corner of a well-made bed. Forget teen angst and despair. Who despairs in heaven?

Royston Tan respectfully disagrees, and he has the footage to support his dissent. The 26-year-old director's new film, 15, explores the dark side of the Singapore story. Shot with a cast of actual public-housing kids rather than actors, 15 mixes graphic realism with quick-cutting, music video-style camerawork to reveal what it's like to be young, alone and angry in a city that refuses to acknowledge your existence. The movie sold out its initial run at this year's Singapore Film Festival, took home many of the major awards and was recently selected to compete in the prestigious Venice Film Festival. Produced to give what Tan calls "a voice to the voiceless," 15 is the best film to come out of Singapore in years.

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Unfortunately, Singaporeans may need to fly to Venice to see it. The city-state's government has yet to approve the film for general theatrical release; according to a source familiar with the negotiations, censors have asked Tan to replace or cut five minutes from the film, including scenes in which the characters rap the names of Singaporean gangs. Tan is currently appealing the cuts, citing not just artistic integrity but the fact that his producers, the independent company Zhao Wei Films, don't have the funds to reshoot new footage—assuming they could reassemble his delinquent cast, a number of whom have been jailed or gone missing since 15 was shot. "The censors can be a little bit narrow minded," Tan says. "They don't see the whole picture, just bits and pieces."

It would be a cruel irony if Singaporeans aren't allowed to see 15, because the Lion City's middle classes would learn more from this film than they did studying for their O-level exams in secondary school. 15 is meant to give its native audience a glimpse of a subculture usually airbrushed out of the official reality. Tan took his stories and his cast from the struggling teenagers he met as a part-time high-school drama teacher, and their gritty tale rings true. The picture follows a group of five teenage delinquent boys as they embark on their daily odyssey of cutting class, chain-smoking, self-piercing, running away from home, fighting, drug taking, drug smuggling, drug selling and contemplating suicide. Ferris Bueller's Day Off, this is not.

It's also not Larry Clark's Kids, a film 15 echoes. Though Tan's teenagers live in a world that seems void of adult authority—or even adult presence—they are hardly the empty-eyed nihilists of Kids. If anything, Tan's punks feel too much, clinging to each other and their noble concepts of friendship and camaraderie, agonizing over parental rejection. They just want to be loved. For every brutality—slicing an obnoxious bully's face, stomping a passerby on the street—15 offers moments of cloying mawkishness. One character lets his friend stay over after he's been kicked out of his parents' house, and they sleep innocently with arms wrapped around each other in a bed surrounded by pornographic pinups. The kids of 15 pose as hard guys, wear tattoos and rap the names of gangs like a protection mantra, but Tan shows them for what they are: young kids with frail bodies, who have no one but each other.

Like American director Spike Jonze, Tan cut his teeth on music videos, and that pedigree shows in the hip-hop numbers that punctuate the film. He mixes documentary realism with dream sequences, rapid montages, video-game graphics, even a darkly comedic animated scene called "Suicide Manual," in which a typical-looking Singaporean kid offs himself in ever more creative—and bloody—ways. Despite his experimental forays, Tan knows when to let the camera linger on the faces of his young actors and wait for the pain to surface. With its white skies and overexposed tropical light, his Singapore is a beautiful void, one that mirrors the emptiness inside his characters.

Tan says that despite the film's many critical plaudits, since shooting 15 he's become more distant from the government. In a city where the state is deeply involved in the film industry (the Singaporean Film Commission was one of 15's producers), Tan knows that could mean serious trouble for his career. "I feel like an outcast." That's an emotion his characters, rebels on the edge of a manufactured paradise, know all too well.