Singaporean filmmaker Ang Geck Geck Priscilla’s debut feature “Ah Girl” won best film in the Asian Feature Film Competition at the Singapore International Film Festival’s Silver Screen Awards on Saturday.
The film follows a seven-year-old girl in 1990s Singapore whose parents have separated. Ang workshopped the project at the festival’s Southeast Asian Film Lab back in 2015, and “Ah Girl” went on to take the Youth Jury Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Ang is an alumna of the Busan Asian Film Academy. Her 2012 short “Broken Crayon” won the Singapore Short Film Awards’ best short film prize.
Afghan filmmaker Shahrbanoo Sadat won best director for “No Good Men,” which opened the Berlinale. Set in Kabul just before the Taliban come back to power, the drama follows a camerawoman whose work, family and freedom are suddenly in doubt. Sadat, who has lived in Germany since 2021, made the 2016 Cannes premiere “Wolf and Sheep” and 2019’s “The Orphanage.”
The jury split the best performance prize. Pushpa Thing Lama was honored for “Elephants in the Fog,” about a member of Nepal’s third-gender Kinnar community searching for her missing daughter. Putri Marino shared the award for “Four Seasons in Java,” a magical realist drama about a woman who goes back to her hometown after two decades behind bars.
The Special Jury Prize went to Japanese director Nagahisa Makoto’s “Burn,” his second feature, which premiered at Sundance. Nagahisa won awards at the same festival for his short “And So We Put Goldfish in the Pool” (2017) and his feature “We Are Little Zombies” (2019).
In the Southeast Asian Short Film Competition, Yogyakarta-based artist-filmmaker Arief Budiman’s “Golden Island” was named best Southeast Asian short. The film, which competed at Rotterdam, follows a videographer from Java and another from Papua as they make a film about Papua together. Thai director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke won best director for “The Bovine Comedy,” a Locarno premiere set in a 2036 where cows have nearly died out. His feature debut “A Useful Ghost” (2025) won the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at Cannes and received a special mention at SGIFF.
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