Ang Geck Geck Priscilla spent more than a decade making “Ah Girl” before she ever made “Ah Girl.”
Three short films and a decade of festival labs later, the Singaporean director’s feature debut is a Centrepiece selection at the Toronto Film Festival for its North American premiere, following wins at Rotterdam and Hong Kong.
The character first appeared in Ang’s 2013 short “Broken Crayon,” which won best short film at the Singapore Short Film Festival that year and kicked off a trilogy that continued with “Little Pigs” and “Happy Birthday.”
Ang says she had a feature in mind from the beginning but didn’t feel ready to commit to one. “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. The shorts became a testing ground for her instincts as a director. “We can’t fly without first learning how to walk,” she says. “The short films were me learning how to walk. ‘Ah Girl’ is the film I was preparing myself to make all along.”
Writing from a child’s vantage point meant deliberately withholding adult understanding rather than supplying it. Ang says she kept returning to a single question while drafting the script: what does Ah Girl see, feel and think is happening, rather than what the audience needs to be told. Children, she says, register far more than the adults around them assume. “She is absorbing everything,” Ang says of her protagonist. “I want the adults watching the film to try to understand the child.”
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