Singapore film Ah Girl wins Youth Jury Award at International Film Festival Rotterdam
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Singaporean film Ah Girl features performances by child actress Ong Xuan Jing.
PHOTO: ANG.GECKGECKPRISCILLA/FACEBOOK
SINGAPORE – Local movie Ah Girl has won the Youth Jury Award at the 55th International Film Festival Rotterdam, which ran from Jan 29 to Feb 8 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
It is the first full-length feature film by Singaporean film-maker Ang Geck Geck, who graduated from Nanyang Technological University’s School of Art, Design and Media in 2012 with a focus on film.
Set in 1990s Singapore, Ah Girl follows the eponymous seven-year-old through the highs and lows of her childhood. It expresses the joy and anguish experienced by kids, as well as the irrationality of adult behaviour as seen through their eyes.
It stars child actresses Ong Xuan Jing, who plays Ah Girl, and Sydney Wong, theatre actress Doreen Toh, as well as Mediacorp artistes Carrie Wong and James Seah.
The humorous and quirky 99-minute drama, which is in Mandarin and English, is based on Ang’s memories of her own childhood.
In a press statement on Feb 6, she said: “I wanted to tell a story about a broken family, from the perspective of a child going through the pressure (of) having to make important decisions that will affect her life to come. This is also a story about self-love. I hope that Ah Girl’s story will show her tenacity in wanting to break away from the vicious cycle of trans-generational trauma.”
Ang, who turned 38 on Feb 7, also wrote in a post on Instagram and Facebook on Feb 7: “Yay. Ah Girl won something... (It’s the) best (birthday) present I could have asked for.”
She added that she spent 10 years making Ah Girl. “I tried almost every producer in Singapore and I was close to giving up. Making this film has taught me so much – how to be stronger, how to deal with rejection, and how important it is to stay grateful to the people who choose to believe in you.”
The Youth Jury Award is selected by five young people from Rotterdam, a city in the Netherlands. By receiving the prize, Ah Girl is internationally labelled as a youth film.
In addition, Ah Girl was part of the film festival’s Bright Future section, which spotlights “feature-length debuts, characterised by original subject matter and an individual style representing the cutting-edge of contemporary film-making”.
The press statement quoted Mr Stefan Borsos, a member of the festival’s selection committee, specialising in South Asian and South-east Asian films, as saying: “The performances of the kids, especially our titular Ah Girl, are sheer wonder and I appreciate so much the director’s intelligence of using the camera format and height to experience the world from the (limited) children’s perspective.”
Singaporean film-maker Ang Geck Geck’s Ah Girl has won the Youth Jury Award at the 55th International Film Festival Rotterdam.
PHOTO: ANG.GECKGECKPRISCILLA/FACEBOOK
Ah Girl was also among the top 25 films in the running for the Audience Award and was shortlisted for the NETPAC Award competition, but lost to I Grew An Inch When My Father Died by Filipino director P.R. Monencillo Patindol.
Other local films selected for the 55th International Film Festival Rotterdam included Badak (2025) by Singaporean film-maker M. Raihan Halim.
Ah Girl is slated to be released in Singapore in the second half of 2026.
