by Raintree Pictures, he made a number of hits dealing with Singapore's heartland problems in an engaging and deceptively light-hearted fashion. I Not Stupid (2002) was a peek into the ultra-competitive academic lifestyle as seen through three local students who performed poorly in grades; its acerbic social commentary marked another height for Singaporean films. Homerun (2003) was a remake of the Iranian Children of Heaven in a local, pre-independent era context; it won for its young lead Megan Zheng the first Golden Horse Award for Best Newcomer. The Best Bet (2004) took a humorous dig at heartlanders' obsessions with lotteries. Neo averages a film per year and his productions feature local Singaporean (usually television) artistes in filmic roles. They have been successes locally and abroad, especially in those places with a Chinese-language market, such as Hong Kong. He has started his own artiste management company, J-Team Productions. Royston Tan, a young Singapore TV commercial director who has been making award-winning shorts for years, released 15: The Movie, his first feature, in 2003. An expanded version of an earlier short film he made, this 90-min movie on the fringe and drug-abusing delinquents used bold subject-matter and featured some graphic scenes with non-professional actors. When the film censorship board passed it with cuts, it prompted a backlash from the director in the form of Cut, an all-singing musical satire à la Tsai Ming-liang lampooning the system. This short film was passed uncensored by the board and was seen during the Singapore International Film Festival, but there were open discussions about it during local parliamentary sessions, prompting remarks that the government was "not amused" by it. Royston Tan has since made three more features, 4:30 (2005), 881 (2007) and 12 Lotus (2008). 2005 to 2009 2005 could be seen as another mini-boom year for Singaporean cinema, with commercially successful fares like Kelvin Tong's horror flick The Maid, two Jack-Neo co-directed movies, I Do I Do and One More Chance, and less mainstream offerings like Eric Khoo's critically acclaimed Cannes opener Be with Me, and Perth, Djinn's dark take on Scorsese's Taxi Driver. In 2006, the independent feature Becoming Royston paid homage to the above-mentioned filmmaker. It was made under new Originasian Pictures. The film went on its festival run in Europe and South Asia and was released in 2007. 2006 also saw the premiere of Singapore Dreaming by Woo Yen Yen and Colin