DOCUMENTARY maker Tan Pin Pin's lips are stretched into a wry smile and her
gaze, transfixed on yours, makes you feel like you are being studied for her
next film.

As an interview subject, she is as difficult to read as the German philosopher
Hegel - more on him later - and you get the impression after a while that this
is the way she likes it.

Although not unfriendly, Tan, 38, is not chatty either. You can't help but feel
you are intruding into her world and that she would rather be somewhere else.

The two-hour chat is littered with disjointed exchanges. She circumvents
questions that require her to explain the "whys" and "hows" of what she does
and asks you questions instead, as if to deflect attention from herself.

She requests that we meet at Samar, a quaint Arabic restaurant in Kampong Glam,
and after exchanging a few words with the owner, starts to muse aloud about the
"Arabic Singaporean diaspora".

As we sit cross-legged on a dais, she then ruminates on the patterned tiles on
the wall, which have been painted over.

"It's a pity because the tiles under the white paint have pretty details, but I
think they did it to keep renovation costs down and to match the black and
white theme of the floor tiles. I also wonder if the original design is more
Peranakan- or Islamic-inspired," she rattles off absently.

The director of such documentaries as Moving House (2002), a 30-minute piece
about the exhumation of graves, and the critically acclaimed Singapore GaGa
(2006) that toured film festivals in Lyon and Rotterdam, does have an uncanny
knack for sifting out details often overlooked by others.

Her sister Tan Lin Lin, 35, a marketing manager with a multinational company,
says: "She's always been very inquisitive about the world, always enquiring,
analysing and absorbing; always pushing the limits and going beyond the
threshold."

Talking to the taciturn auteur, you sense she's a curious mix of enthusiastic
inquisitor and esoteric intellectual.

An inadvertent admission that she still keeps all the photographs she has ever
taken reveals a softer, sentimental side. But then there is that distant smile,
hinting of smugness, which seems to hide a thousand more words.

Her work, too, is as multi-layered. Her latest documentary, Invisible City, a
55-minute piece now screening at The Arts House, chronicles the ways people
attempt to leave a mark before they and their histories disappear.

As the film unfurls, you find it also speaks of mortality, the ravages of time
on existence, and questions what truth and history really are.

Film-maker Jasmine Ng, 35, who has known Tan since 1995, says: "She enters from
a point of view of something very small but the end product has so many layers
that everyone comes out feeling touched in one way or the other."

Sexploits of Barbie dolls

MANY of Tan's films have been no stranger to controversy or acclaim.
She filmed her first documentary in 1996 while she was completing her law
training at a law firm.

It was on the exhumation of her great-grandfather's grave as the cemetery it
was in was slated for residential development.

The personal piece later translated into the 30-minute documentary Moving
House, which followed a family's sadness and confusion as they exhumed their
parents' grave with a Taoist ritual. It won a Student Academy Award, given out
since 1972 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which also gives
out the Oscar awards.

Tan won for Best Documentary in 2002, making her Singapore's only Oscar winner
to date.

In 1999, she made a three-minute short about the sexploits of Barbie dolls
called Lurve Me Now, which was banned from being screened here by the
censorship board.

"It was the first time my film was banned and my first taste of the power of
the state on a personal level," she says. "I was naive to expect that the
censors would be able to see the film?s irony, as Barbie started as a sex toy
in Germany."

Last year's Singapore GaGa, a 55-minute paean to the quirkiness of the aural
landscape, was widely hailed as one of the best films about the country and was
the first local documentary to be released in cinemas here.

She has also made films for the Discovery Channel and Arts Central and was an
assistant producer on shows like Growing Up, Triple 9 and Under One Roof at the
Television Corporation of Singapore (now MediaCorp) from 1996 to 1998. So far,
she has just under 20 documentaries to her name.

Mr Tan Tarn How, 47, a playwright and senior research fellow at the Institute
of Policy Studies, which supported the production of Invisible City, says: "Pin
Pin's work is an important contribution to the Singapore film scene because it
goes beyond providing the simple thrills. She is not so much into
straightforward story-telling, but she forces you to see things you have never
seen before."

Her paper qualifications are just as impressive: a second-class honours in a
Bachelor of Arts in Jurisprudence from Britain's Oxford University on a Loke
Cheng Kim scholarship in 1991, and a Master of Fine Arts from Chicago?s
Northwestern University on an S. Rajaratnam scholarship 10 years later.

The former Victoria Junior College student and Raffles Girls' School swimmer
and prefect does in fact admit with a chuckle: "You could say I was the 'mugger
toad' type."

In an unexpected moment of candour, she also reveals that she sang in the
primary school choir at the Convent of Our Lady of Good Counsel.

She says she went to Oxford because "I just knew I wanted to leave Singapore
and that there was a much bigger world for me to explore".

There, she was "blown away by the possibilities" as she found people could
study things as arcane as the Greek language.

BOSSY BIG SISTER: Tan Pin Pin (when she was eight, in the middle), with younger sisters Lin Lin (from left) and Chin Chin.

Never enamoured of the idea of practising as a lawyer, she decided she wanted
to be a photographer and film-maker the minute she stumbled upon "some really
amazing photography books" in the university library one day.

Her first camera was a Contax SLR MT167, which she had won in a lucky draw
before she left for England. With it, she took thousands of photographs which
she says are still "lying around somewhere" today.

Recalling how she spent many evenings in the dark room in her dormitory
developing pictures, she says: "I realised I was really enjoying photography
and was in my element more so than I ever was when I did law."

During her university vacations, she freelanced as a photographer with The
Straits Times.

Upon graduating, she got a university grant to spend three months in China to
work on a photo essay titled What It Means To Be Chinese.

There, she "found" her identity as a Chinese Singaporean.

"I'm always a believer of first-hand experience," she states plainly.
Perhaps that's why she also spent six weeks in 1989 working in a kibbutz, a
communal settlement in rural Israel, at the height of the Intifada, the
Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule from 1987 to 1993. That's where she
got first-hand experience of tear gas, which the Israeli army used against the
Palestinians.

"It was extremely pungent, it made me really uncomfortable and my eyes burned,"
she recalls.

Secrets of a void deck

TAN says she has always had a heightened awareness of space, people,
structures, and subtexts - all the things she explores and exploits in her
films.

She attributes this to being the child of folks "in the construction business".

She was born the eldest of three daughters to two architects "but looked after
by the maid" as her parents were almost always at work. The family lived in a
semi-detached house in Serangoon Park and family outings invariably included a
visit to a construction site.

Tan, who is single, recalls how she, Lin Lin and Chin Chin, now 32, would
excitedly walk over planks and across water puddles because they wanted to know
what was being built and how.

Her father is now semi-retired from his own architectural practice.

Her mother, who died of cancer when Tan was 18, would march up to a house she
liked - with her little daughters in tow - to ask the owner's permission to
explore its interior.

"What I do now is very similar, entering people's worlds as a documentary
director and appreciating their lives," observes Tan, adding: "That's probably
how I got so curious. I just developed a lot of awareness of my surroundings."

It's also how Invisible City was born: She had found a stack of cardboard boxes
in the corner of the void deck of her Cambridge Road HDB flat, which she later
discovered was used by a group of delivery men as cushions to rest on during
lunchtime.

Her intention then was to make a documentary about various spaces in Singapore
that were invisible to everyone except those who use them.

Displaying a droll wit, she explains: "Who would've known that things so devoid
of any kind of meaning - it's a void deck, right? - would be so meaningful for
this bunch of drivers? That the only sign of their existence was a stack of
cardboard boxes tucked behind a fire hydrant?"

As it turned out, the footage from her interviews with the delivery men fell to
the cutting-room floor. Somewhere along the way, Tan realised Invisible City
was not about spaces at all.

"It's about memories and fragments that are left behind and the effect of time
on a life, really," she concludes.

Near the end, one of the film's characters does, in fact, quote Hegel,
interpreting his famous statement that "All that is real is rational; and all
that is rational is real" to mean that things exist because they have a reason
to exist.

Ask Tan if this is what she believes and she says yes, but not before adding
the caveat that "the audience should be able to decide for themselves as far as
they can".

For now, it is not her ambition to go to Hollywood. She just wants to keep
making films - while she juggles doing commercial work to pay the bills - that
can reach out to different people in different segments of society here and
around the world.

"To me, it is worth so much more that my films are screened and watched in
Singapore. Everything else is a bonus," she says.

Before we part ways, she asks if I have a minute as she wants to show me
something.

We walk to an old, Art Deco-style building in nearby Aliwal Street that was
formerly Chung Cheng High School, but which is now inhabited by the No 1
Costume Costume shop, crammed with fancy dress costumes.

Tan seems utterly mesmerised by it. We explore its grounds in near-silence. I
feel she is trying to tell me something, but I don't know what. So I ask her
what she is working on next.

First comes that wry smile then the cryptic reply: "Probably something about
Inuka the polar bear."

The famous denizen of the Singapore Zoo was born in Singapore in 1990 and was
most recently in the news because of a debate over whether to send him to a zoo
in a temperate climate once his mother Sheba, who is 30, dies.

I don't know if she's pulling my leg, so I guess everyone will have to wait for
her next work to find out.

> Invisible City is showing at The Arts House until Aug 12. Tickets at $8
(adults) and $6 (students with ID) are available from The Arts House box
office, 1 Old Parliament Lane. Ticketing hotline: 6332-6919 (Mon to Fri 10am to
8pm, Sat 11am to 8pm).
Log on to www.invisiblecity.sg for showtimes.