Tiong Bahru Social Club

Tiong Bahru Social Club is a colourful and quirky social satire on modern Singaporean society, set inside a whimsical trial housing project that aims to use data to create the world’s happiest neighbourhood. 30-year-old Ah Bee lives a monotonous life with his mother. After being fired from his job, he enrols at Tiong Bahru Social Club to learn how to improve his life with the help of artificial intelligence. But as time goes by, Ah Bee’s encounters with the neighbourhood’s residents reveal the absurdities of data-driven life.

‘Tiong Bahru Social Club is a stylised satire about Ah Bee’s journey through a data-driven project to create the happiest neighbourhood in the world. We have given the iconic neighbourhood a fantastical spin and a visual make-over so audiences will be in for a treat as they wander through the whimsical universe of Tiong Bahru Social Club. At the heart of the film, this is a story that questions the construct and mechanics of happiness today. I think it takes very little for people to be happy. The film is a social commentary on a global tendency to measure happiness as the new GDP, to quantify how well we are doing.’

Director Tan Bee Thiam, from an interview with Time Out.