KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 14 — Local filmmaker Ho Yuhang last week added another international accolade to his list of achievements after he trounced over a hundred other competitors to win the inaugural FT/OppenheimerFunds Emerging Voices Awards in New York.

The win was for “Trespassed”, a short black-and-white film about a girl possessed by the spirit of her missing father.

Delighted by the award that saw him walking away with a US$40,000 (RM168,568) prize, Ho said he hopes it will again draw attention to his work as a filmmaker as he plans to shoot a new film soon.

“I have been quiet for a while and now people are reminded of me again. So people [will] naturally start getting curious about my new work too,” he told Malay Mail Online.

“One of the judges Mira Nair, the film director at the awards, [said] that my short film haunted her for days. I was delighted,” he added.

“Trespassed” tells the story of a young girl who starts having epileptic fits after her father goes missing and there are no medical solutions to her problem.

She appears in her mother’s dream and reveals a possible solution to her suffering.

For “Trespassed”, Ho said loosely drew inspiration from his experience with his late sister, who he said had been born with an undetermined illness.

He said his sister was cared for by his mother up until she passed on.

“My sister was sick for a long time and we couldn’t do anything about it. So I made a ghost story to deal with some feelings and memories,” he said.

“I shot it in black and white and it’s a surreal film. I had no expectations because I really didn’t know if people are receptive to my unusual narrative.”

For his next film, Ho plans on making a feature-length action movie he is calling “Mrs. K”.

He said he has already started making calls for auditions.

“My new film is about a woman with a dark past and I wrote it for an ex-Shaw Brothers martial arts actress who acted in my last film,” he said.

“‘Mrs. K” would be Ho’s fifth feature film and his first since his 2009 release of “At the End of Daybreak” which saw among others, a NETPAC award win at that year’s Locarno International Film Festival and a nomination for the Asian film award at the 2009 Tokyo International Film Festival.