SINGAPORE – Hong Huifang and Richie Koh – two Singapore actors widely lauded for their craft – will join forces for a new local movie.

The pair will star in A Good Child, a comedy-drama about a drag queen (played by Koh) who returns home to his dementia-stricken mother (Hong).

He reconstructs her memory to make her believe he is her daughter instead of her son. Along the way, he also unknowingly confronts his childhood traumas.

This will mark Hong’s return to the big screen, after the 63-year-old was nominated for Best Leading Actress at the Golden Horse Awards in 2022 for her role in the Singapore film Ajoomma (2022). Koh, 30, clinched the Best Actor prize at the Star Awards in 2023 for his performance as an intellectually disabled adult in the drama series Your World In Mine (2022). 

They previously co-starred in the Mediacorp dialect drama Whatever Will Be, Will Be (2023).

A Good Child will be helmed by Singaporean director Ong Kuo Sin, whose past credits include Number 1 (2020), about a middle-aged man who finds himself accidentally becoming a drag queen. The film starred local actor Mark Lee, who was nominated for Best Leading Actor at the Golden Horse Awards in 2020.

Ong also directed the local musical comedy film Mr Unbelievable (2015), a spin-off from a viral music video featuring local actor Chen Tianwen.

Ong, who also wrote A Good Child’s script, said in a press statement that the upcoming film represents for him a “back-to-basics approach of storytelling”, with the characters and their stories taking centre stage.

“I hope we will have the film firmly anchored in the rawest emotions of human connections,” he added.

A Good Child has a production budget of $1.4 million, and is slated to be released in 2025. Its cast also includes Taiwanese-American actor Johnny Lu, Singaporean actor-singer Charlie Goh and Mediacorp artiste Cheryl Chou.