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\n\tAng Geck Geck Priscilla spent more than a decade making \u201cAh Girl<\/a>\u201d before she ever made \u201cAh Girl.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThree short films and a decade of festival labs later, the Singaporean director\u2019s feature debut is a Centrepiece selection at the Toronto Film Festival<\/a> for its North American premiere, following wins at Rotterdam and Hong Kong.<\/p>\n \n\tThe character first appeared in Ang\u2019s 2013 short \u201cBroken Crayon,\u201d which won best short film at the Singapore Short Film Festival that year and kicked off a trilogy that continued with \u201cLittle Pigs\u201d and \u201cHappy Birthday.\u201d <\/p>\n \n\tAng says she had a feature in mind from the beginning but didn\u2019t feel ready to commit to one. \u201cA feature is a much bigger commitment, creatively, financially and emotionally, and I wanted to make sure I was ready for that responsibility,\u201d she says. The shorts became a testing ground for her instincts as a director. \u201cWe can\u2019t fly without first learning how to walk,\u201d she says. \u201cThe short films were me learning how to walk. \u2018Ah Girl\u2019 is the film I was preparing myself to make all along.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWriting from a child\u2019s 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. \u201cShe is absorbing everything,\u201d Ang says of her protagonist. \u201cI want the adults watching the film to try to understand the child.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThat dynamic sharpens around the film\u2019s central dilemma, in which Ah Girl is asked to choose which parent she wants to live with. \u201cSometimes they are hoping to hear the answer that will make them feel better about themselves,\u201d she says. \u201cA seven-year-old should never have to carry that emotional responsibility.\u201d She adds that the film returns throughout to the gap between listening to a child and making a child responsible for an adult\u2019s decision: \u201cThe adults keep asking her what she wants, but very few of them actually stop to ask what she needs.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThe 1990s setting is deliberate rather than nostalgic, Ang says, tied to the absence of a phone or a message as an escape hatch when a parent walks away. \u201cThat distance creates a certain helplessness and desperation,\u201d she says. Casting took close to a year, resolving in newcomer Ong Xuan Jing, who spent three months building trust and playing games with Ang before filming began rather than rehearsing lines. \u201cI wasn\u2019t necessarily looking for the best child actor,\u201d Ang says. \u201cI was looking for someone who was already close to Ah Girl as a person.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tAng also resisted turning either parent into a villain, even as the film shows both failing their children in different ways. \u201cThey are two people who became parents before they were emotionally ready to be parents,\u201d she says. \u201cLoving your child and knowing how to love your child are not always the same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cAh Girl\u201d was developed at Southeast Asia Fiction Film Lab, where it won the Open SEA Fund Award, and went through Golden Horse Film Project Promotion\u2019s work-in-progress section, the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum and Focus Asia at the Far East Film Festival in Udine. <\/p>\n \n\tAggregate Films, IFA Media and Kusu Films are credited as producers, alongside Charlyn Ng and Wendy Lie, and the project was backed by Infocomm Media Development Authority Singapore\u2019s New SG Director Grant and the Purin Film Fund. Hoping Chen, who won the best film editing award for \u201cBel Ami\u201d at the 61st Golden Horse Film Festival, edited the film.<\/p>\n \n\tSince premiering at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it won the Youth Jury Award, \u201cAh Girl\u201d has traveled to Melbourne, Hong Kong, Udine, Innsbruck, Shanghai, Munich, Da Nang, Bucheon and Malaysia. <\/p>\n \n\tThe film also collected 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. Ang says she\u2019s been struck by how audiences across very different cultures have told her they see themselves in Ah Girl. \u201cThere is something very powerful about two strangers not sharing the same language or upbringing, but recognizing the same emotion in each other,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \n\tAng isn\u2019t finished with the character. She hopes to follow Ah Girl through a trilogy spanning childhood, adolescence and middle age, ideally with the same cast aging alongside their roles. Before that, though, she\u2019s turning to a psychological horror feature expanded from \u201cBroken Crayon,\u201d the thesis short that started it all. \u201cI\u2019ve loved horror films since I was about six years old, so it\u2019s actually quite funny that after all these years, I\u2019ve never made one,\u201d she says. \u201cSo no, Ah Girl hasn\u2019t left me. I\u2019m just letting her grow up a little while I go and scare some people first.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Ang Geck Geck Priscilla spent more than a decade making \u201cAh Girl\u201d before she ever made \u201cAh Girl.\u201d Three short films and a decade of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":84476,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2611],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz-headlines","wpcat-2611-id"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=84475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/84476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=84475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=84475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=84475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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