'Ah Girl' Premieres at TIFF After Decade of Short-Film Development — SkimNews
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- Ang Geck Geck Priscilla spent more than a decade developing 'Ah Girl' through three festival-tested shorts — 'Broken Crayon' (2013), 'Little Pigs,' and 'Happy Birthday' — before completing her first feature, saying 'The short films were me learning how to walk.'
- 'Ah Girl' arrives at the Toronto Film Festival as a Centrepiece selection, having already won the Youth Jury Award at Rotterdam, a Golden Firebird Award for best actress at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, and additional prizes at Melbourne, Udine, Munich, and Bucheon.
- The film centers on a seven-year-old asked to choose which parent to live with in 1990s Singapore — an era Ang chose deliberately because the absence of a phone left no escape when a parent walked away.
- Newcomer Ong Xuan Jing was cast after nearly a year of searching, spending three months playing games with Ang to build trust rather than rehearsing lines; Ang says she was looking 'for someone who was already close to Ah Girl as a person.'
- Aggregate Films, IFA Media, and Kusu Films produced the film alongside Charlyn Ng and Wendy Lie, with development support from Southeast Asia Fiction Film Lab (Open SEA Fund Award), Golden Horse Film Project Promotion, the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum, and IMDA Singapore's New SG Director Grant.
- Ang plans a trilogy following Ah Girl through childhood, adolescence, and middle age with the same cast, but is first directing a psychological horror feature expanded from her 2013 short 'Broken Crayon,' noting she's loved horror 'since I was about six years old.'
Why it matters: After wins at Rotterdam and Hong Kong and a Centrepiece slot at Toronto, Ang has placed her Singaporean debut on three major festival stages within roughly a year. Her planned trilogy and horror feature ahead show she has long-term directorial ambitions rather than a single-project career, with audiences across very different cultures already telling her they recognize themselves in Ah Girl.
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