Singaporean director Ang Geck Geck Priscilla's feature debut "Ah Girl" is having its North American premiere as a Centrepiece selection at the Toronto Film Festival, arriving after wins at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and in Hong Kong.
The film caps more than a decade of work on the same character, who first appeared in Ang's 2013 short "Broken Crayon," winner of best short film at the Singapore Short Film Festival that year. That film launched a trilogy continued through "Little Pigs" and "Happy Birthday." Ang says she envisioned a feature from the start but held off. "A feature is a much bigger commitment, creatively, financially and emotionally, and I wanted to make sure I was ready for that responsibility," she says. "We can't fly without first learning how to walk. The short films were me learning how to walk. 'Ah Girl' is the film I was preparing myself to make all along."
The script is built strictly around the child's perspective. "She is absorbing everything," Ang says of her young protagonist. "I want the adults watching the film to try to understand the child." That approach shapes the film's central conflict, in which Ah Girl is asked to pick which parent she wants to live with. "Sometimes they are hoping to hear the answer that will make them feel better about themselves," Ang says. "A seven-year-old should never have to carry that emotional responsibility. The adults keep asking her what she wants, but very few of them actually stop to ask what she needs."
Ang set the story in the 1990s specifically because a phone or a message wasn't available as a quick fix when a parent left. "That distance creates a certain helplessness and desperation," she says. Casting took nearly a year before newcomer Ong Xuan Jing was chosen; the two spent three months building trust and playing games rather than rehearsing lines. "I wasn't necessarily looking for the best child actor," Ang says. "I was looking for someone who was already close to Ah Girl as a person." Ang also avoided villainizing either parent: "They are two people who became parents before they were emotionally ready to be parents. Loving your child and knowing how to love your child are not always the same thing."
"Ah Girl" was developed at the Southeast Asia Fiction Film Lab, where it won the Open SEA Fund Award, and went through the Golden Horse Film Project Promotion's work-in-progress section, the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum and Focus Asia at the Far East Film Festival in Udine. Aggregate Films, IFA Media and Kusu Films are credited as producers alongside Charlyn Ng and Wendy Lie, with backing from the Infocomm Media Development Authority Singapore's New SG Director Grant and the Purin Film Fund. Hoping Chen, who won the best film editing award for "Bel Ami" at the 61st Golden Horse Film Festival, edited the picture.
Since premiering at IFFR, where it won the Youth Jury Award, "Ah Girl" has screened in Melbourne, Hong Kong, Udine, Innsbruck, Shanghai, Munich, Da Nang, Bucheon and Malaysia. It also earned a Golden Firebird Award for best actress in a Chinese-language film at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, along with a best actress prize and the New Hope Award at the Malaysia International Film Festival. "There is something very powerful about two strangers not sharing the same language or upbringing, but recognizing the same emotion in each other," Ang says of the response across different audiences.
Ang plans to continue following the character through a trilogy tracking childhood, adolescence and middle age, ideally with the same cast aging into their roles. First, though, she's moving to a psychological horror feature expanded from "Broken Crayon," the thesis short that began the project. "I've loved horror films since I was about six years old, so it's actually quite funny that after all these years, I've never made one," she says. "So no, Ah Girl hasn't left me. I'm just letting her grow up a little while I go and scare some people first."
