SINGAPORE – Local film-maker Nicole Midori Woodford auditioned close to a hundred teenage girls in Singapore for the lead role in her debut feature film Last Shadow At First Light.

Opening exclusively at The Projector on May 9, the drama revolves around a 16-year-old who lives in Singapore with her Singaporean father (played by local actor Peter Yu).

Haunted by visions of entities from other worlds, the youngster travels to Japan to solve the mystery of her missing Japanese mother (Mariko Tsutsui). Arriving in Tokyo, she is met by her taxi driver uncle (Masatoshi Nagase), who appears reluctant to help her discover the truth about her mum.

Writer-director Woodford tells The Straits Times: “I was trying to find someone who could carry the heart of the film. Being the writer of the film, I knew the intensity of the role. I knew that she would have to carry scenes that were even more challenging than the scenes for the veteran actors.”

The 37-year-old was looking for a bicultural girl, someone with a dual Singapore-Japanese identity, who looked as if she would be familiar with the culture of both countries.

“Interviewing and auditioning girls from the Japanese expat community in Singapore, I found that some do not have that shared experience – they would need to know what it is like to be in two worlds, to belong to both but also to neither,” she says.

For example, she found some who had never been to a hawker centre. She also took a few girls on the shortlist on outings to see how immersed they were in Singapore culture.

No one fit the bill. It was only after Woodford, whose grandmother is Japanese, travelled to Japan for casting and met Mihaya Shirata that she knew she had found the right person to play the main character, though the Japanese actress had never played a lead role.

Shirata, now 20, was born in Japan and partly raised in Hawaii. She is fluent in Japanese and English, and so could communicate with the multinational crew and with Woodford, who says she is not fluent in Japanese.

The young actress also carries the sense of outsiderness that Woodford was looking for.

“Like the character, she had lived abroad and returned to Japan. She experienced the feeling of being a stranger in her own country,” she says.

For Last Shadow At First Light, Woodford was nominated for an award in the New Directors competition at the San Sebastian International Film Festival in 2023. She was also nominated for the Silver Screen Awards at the Singapore International Film Festival that same year.

She is a lecturer at Nanyang Technological University’s School of Art, Design and Media and teaches subjects such as scriptwriting, film production and editing. She belongs to the school’s pioneer batch, graduating in 2009 and has taught there since 2018.

Woodford thought that she would be able to shoot in Japan in 2020, but the pandemic shut down those plans.

She took advantage of the pause to, over Zoom, coach Shirata in Mandarin, which she speaks in the Singapore-set portions of the story.

In addition to making sure the girl’s Mandarin had the correct Singapore accent, Woodford also coached Shirata on her blocking, the spots where actors are placed in the frame.

With the relaxing of travel restrictions, Woodford and her team were able to film in Singapore in late 2021. In 2022, they travelled to Rikuzentakata, a city in the northeastern part of the main island of Honshu, Japan, to shoot the rest.

Woodford says that while Last Shadow At First Light is not autobiographical, it is inspired by stories she had heard in her family when she was growing up.

In her director’s statement, she talks about how her late grandmother Asako had spoken about her life in Japan in the 1940s. She had married Woodford’s grandfather, a British-Portuguese ship engineer in Japan, during the Korean War and moved to Singapore.

“My aunt and my dad are half-Japanese, half-Eurasian. They were raised in Singapore, but a part of them is also Japanese. As a teacher, I’ve also met students from mixed backgrounds and we would share stories,” she says.

“I wanted my first film to be me asking questions that were important to me.”

• Last Shadow At First Light opens exclusively at The Projector on May 9. Film-maker Nicole Midori Woodford and actress Mihaya Shirata will hold question-and-answer sessions at The Projector after the screenings on May 9, 7.30pm, and May 11, 4.30pm.