Singaporean drama series Perfect Girl is now available on Netflix and on South Korea’s streaming service Naver.
Perfect Girl, starring Jason Chan and Christian Lee, tells the tale of a guy who meets his high school crush 10 years later.
The series is produced by BananaMana Films, which was also founded by Chan and Lee. The pair also co-directed and produced the drama. The series was filmed in Singapore for $1000.
The series has won seven international awards including Outstanding Drama Series at the Toronoto WebFest 2015 and Outstanding Writing, Directing and Drama at the Los Angeles Web Festival 2015.
In early 2016, the drama was acquired by Viki, a video streaming website that is an independent subsidiary of Japanese internet services company Rakuten.
The series is now available to Netflix’s international audience.
“Now, people can watch Perfect Girl locally and globally, while giving us a nice confidence boost to produce more local content that goes straight to global distribution,” Lee said. “We hope that Perfect Girl will reach all the people globally who want to watch Asian dramas in English. Even though the series has been translated into Polish, Romanian, Japanese, Chinese and Korean, we think that it being in English will make it as accessible and popular as any Hollywood piece of content.”
Korean web portal Naver also picked up BananaMana’s two other series – Bang Bang Club and What Do Men Want?.
“We have made history by being the first non-domestic web dramas to go onto the Naver platform,” Lee said, “Naver gives it the credibility of quality storytelling on par with the great K-dramas, side by side with web dramas produced by all the big TV stations in Korea, and Netflix gives it distribution marketing and access to the world.”
The addition to Netflix means that BananaMana Films is proudly putting Singaporean drama on the global map. “The multiple awards internationally have raised a lot of questions about this little web drama from Singapore,” Lee said. “Locally, no one was seeing the value of Perfect Girl, but we knew deep in our hearts that we had made something to be very proud of. We also hope that we inspire other local content producers to realise that if BananaMana Films can make Perfect Girl for S$1,000 with a crew of four, it’s not (necessary to have a) big budget to make quality dramas here in Singapore that travel outside our borders.”
“In addition, Perfect Girl has been picked up by Scoot, and it will likely go on several other airlines through our inflight distributor, Encore Inflight Limited.”
