Teri Malvar's film career is the stuff of fairytales. While accompanying her part-time actress mom to an audition, she unexpectedly landed the main role. That film was Sigrid Andrea P. Bernardo's coming-of-age drama Anita's Last Cha-Cha, a competition entry in the 1st CineFilipino Film Festival. Set in a small village in the Philippines, Malvar depicted the (lesbian) first love story of its 12-year-old protagonist with effortless charm and sensitivity. Malvar caused a media storm when she won the festival's Best Actress award, beating screen legend Nora Aunor. It also shared the Best Film Award. Anita is one of several daring castings with which Malvar has broadened the range of Philippines' cinema. Malvar followed Anita with Kip Oebanda's human trafficking drama In the Can, in which she played one of a group of children forced to work long hours in a sardine-canning factory. Her next two films owe a debt to The Wicker Man, True Detective and the works of David Lynch. In Alec Figuracion's Zigzag Road, she played the moral center of a nuclear family who are trapped together with other travelers when their car cannot find its way out of a spaghetti nest of twisting roads. In Jet Leyco's mystery Town in a Lake she played a schoolgirl who disappears when her best friend (and alleged lesbian lover) is rape-murdered. Both films create rich mythologies whose undercurrents consume their contemporary protagonists. With Ralston Jover's Haze, Malvar is on the cusp of getting the international attention she deserves. Conceived as the tale of four homeless street kids, Malvar's screen-stealing performance as Jinky led the filmmakers to refashion the film's second half around her. She won her second Best Actress award for her fiery portrayal at the Cinema One Originals Film Festival. In the weeks leading up to NYAFF, she will compete for Best Actress at the Shanghai and Moscow International Film Festivals, which are hosting the film's Asian and European premieres.