Inside ‘Ah Girl,’ the Singapore Drama Built From a Director’s Own Childhood: ‘We Can’t Fly Without First Learning How to Walk’

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.”

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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.”

That dynamic sharpens around the film’s central dilemma, in which Ah Girl is asked to choose which parent she wants to live with. “Sometimes they are hoping to hear the answer that will make them feel better about themselves,” she says. “A seven-year-old should never have to carry that emotional responsibility.” She adds that the film returns throughout to the gap between listening to a child and making a child responsible for an adult’s decision: “The adults keep asking her what she wants, but very few of them actually stop to ask what she needs.”

The 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. “That distance creates a certain helplessness and desperation,” 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. “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 resisted turning either parent into a villain, even as the film shows both failing their children in different ways. “They are two people who became parents before they were emotionally ready to be parents,” she says. “Loving your child and knowing how to love your child are not always the same thing.”

“Ah Girl” was developed at Southeast Asia Fiction Film Lab, where it won the Open SEA Fund Award, and went through 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, and the project was backed by 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 film.

Since premiering at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it won the Youth Jury Award, “Ah Girl” has traveled to Melbourne, Hong Kong, Udine, Innsbruck, Shanghai, Munich, Da Nang, Bucheon and Malaysia.

The 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’s been struck by how audiences across very different cultures have told her they see themselves in Ah Girl. “There is something very powerful about two strangers not sharing the same language or upbringing, but recognizing the same emotion in each other,” she says.

Ang isn’t 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’s turning to a psychological horror feature expanded from “Broken Crayon,” the thesis short that started it all. “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.”