Leading Asia-based film makers Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Fran Borgia and Yulia Evina Bhara (“The Science of Fictions”) are set as producers among the five projects selected to participate in the 2020 edition of the Southeast Asia Fiction Film Lab (SEAFIC). The lab provides eight months of development under the guidance of dedicated script advisers.
Palme d’Or winner, Weerasethakul and Kissada Kamyoung will produce “9 Temples to Heaven,” a second feature by director Sompot Chidgasornpongse (“Railway Sleepers”). The story involves an outing that tests a family’s relationships and beliefs.
Borgia (“A Land Imagined,” line producer on “Crazy Rich Asians”) and Judith Tong are producing first film “Amoeba,” by Siyou Tan, a Singaporean filmmaker and visual artist, whose short film “Hello Ahma” played in Berlin and Toronto. The story focuses on a misfit girl in the 1990s.
Bhara and Siska Raharja are set to produce “Mayday,” by Indonesian first timer Eden Junjung. When a woman’s workplace sexual harassment secret is revealed to her husband, he sets out of a course of revenge.
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Other projects are “Cangrejos,” to be directed by Zurich Chan and produced by Gale Osorio of The Philippines, and “Oasis of Now” by Malaysian pairing, director Chia Chee Sum and producer Lee Yve Vonn. “Cangrejos” sees poor, hardscrabble villagers pushed over the edge by insurgent activity, resulting in violence and loss of humanity. Chan previously made 2011 film “Teoriya.” “Oasis” dramatizes the secret life of a Vietnamese housekeeper in Malaysia, and her encounter with a Malay stranger.
Each year SEAFIC invites 1st, 2nd and 3rd-time filmmakers to work with a script consultant and international experts through a process of three lab sessions: the first and second in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and the final session, called SEAFIC Open House, in November.
The five projects are also automatically enrolled in the SEAFICxPAS program, a producer’s lab organized by Nantes Festival des 3 Continents’ Produire au Sud initiative that will be held alongside.