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Another Country Dir Jeon Soo-il Country of origin South Korea Having just wrapped shooting on his latest feature Padre Park in Peru, South Korean director Jeon Soo-il is wasting no time getting started on his next project, Another Country, which will be set in France. Currently at the script stage, it is a road movie about a husband trying to track down his wife after she goes missing on the first night of their honeymoon in Paris. “It is based on a true story that happened about 20 years ago to Korean honeymooners in Paris. The husband found his wife a year later in the Southern port city of Marseilles,” says Jeon. The main theme of the film is identity. “It is a story about how a man goes about finding his wife, encountering people of different races and cultures, and how through this process, he finds himself,” says Jeon, who plans to shoot on location in Paris and Marseilles to create the right atmosphere of diverse immigrant cultures. “The places will be as important as the characters in this film,” says the director, who is no stranger to France, having studied at the Ecole Supérieure de Réalisation Audiovisuelle and at the University of Paris. He plans to complete the script by this summer, while at the same time hunting for locations. Michelle Son, head of M-Line Distribution, is attached as producer and brings to the project her international expertise. The film will be produced through Jeon’s own production company, Dongnyuk Film, which also turned out his previous independent arthouse films With A Girl Of Black Soil (2007), Himalaya, Where The Wind Dwells (2008) and I Came From Busan (2009), all of which have made him a regular at international film festivals. With $200,000 of the project’s $1m budget raised, the team will be looking for funds at HAF. Jean Noh Another Country Budget $1m Finance raised to date: $200,000 from private funds Contact Jina Kim sales@mline-distribution.com n 14 Screen International at Filmart March 20, 2012 Tang Wong Dir Kongdej Jaturanrasmee Country of origin Thailand Thai screenwriter and director Kongdej Jaturanrasmee has two reasons to attend the Hong Kong International Film Festival. As well as showcasing his latest feature P-047, he will be in town to attract backing for his new project Tang Wong, a comedy drama about the conflict between traditional spirituality and modern beliefs in Thailand. Jaturanrasmee has written the script for Tang Wong, which centres around four teenage boys who promise to perform a traditional dance at a Thai shrine in exchange for their dreams coming true, but are reluctant to go through with the routine when their wishes are granted. Producer Soros Sukhum believes there are similarities between P-047 — which screened at the Venice Film Festival last year — and Jaturanrasmee’s new film, which is being made through Song Sound Production, the company set up by Sukhum and Jaturanrasmee to produce features (including P-047), shorts, music videos and commercials. “Both films deal with the subject of identity. P-047 talks about finding human identity while Tang Wong raises a bigger question of what really is the identity of a nation. The film seeks to talk about Thai society’s conflict with traditional spirituality in the face of modern scientific beliefs and international cultures,” says Sukhum, who has worked with directors including Aditya Assarat on Wonderful Town and Sivaroj Kongsakul on Eternity. Currently in pre-production with a cast made up largely of non-professional actors, the pair have already raised $170,000 of their budget via the Thai Ministry of Culture and private financing. With shooting due to begin in April, they will be hoping to attract co-producers and sales agents who can bring in funds and/or postproduction and pre-sales. Jean Noh Tang Wong Budget $450,000 Finance raised to date $170,000 from the Thai Ministry of Culture and private funds Contact Soros Sukhum bbunghim@yahoo.com Flowing Stories Dir Jessey Tsang Tsui-shan Country of origin Hong Kong-France-UK Jessey Tsang Tsui-shan’s documentary feature Flowing Stories revolves around the 500-year-old Ho Chung village in Hong Kong’s New Territories in which she grew up. Almost half the village has emigrated overseas since the 1960s, mostly to the UK and France. Using the Ho Chung river as a central motif, Tsang aims to create a visual history of Hong Kong’s disappearing village traditions, at the same time as exploring wider issues such as migration and the notion of home. “I was one of those people who travelled, but basically stayed in the village, so as I was growing up I became interested in whether our concept of ‘home’ is mental or physical,” Tsang explains. Tsang has already interviewed some of the village’s former inhabitants in their current homes in Paris, Calais, Edinburgh and London and recently returned to Hong Kong to shoot the local scenes. She also plans to mix in old family photos and archival footage, and hopes to include some animation sequences to recreate villagers’ memories, which would be difficult to film. During HAF, Tsang and her producer Teresa Kwong hope to secure funds for post-production and find an international sales agent or distributor. A graduate of the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, Tsang’s credits also include award-winning short Lonely Planet and debut feature Lovers On The Road (2008), about a couple who break up after moving to Beijing. Her second feature, Big Blue Lake (2011), was a fictional, but partly auto-biographical, account of a young woman returning to Ho Chung village after working overseas to find her mother suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and her father out of town. Kwong, who produced Tsang’s previous two features, is also senior programme manager of the Hong Kong Arts Centre and director of talent incubator ifva. Liz Shackleton Flowing Stories Budget $130,000 Finance raised to date $38,000 from Hong Kong’s Arts Development Council and Pure Art Foundation Contact Teresa Kwong, River Vision Production kwongps27@gmail.com
Hangman Dir Jakrawal Nilthamrong, Ionut Piturescu Countries of origin Thailand-Denmark-Romania One of two projects at this year’s HAF to come out of the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival’s DOX:LAB 2011 — which pairs European and non-European film-makers — Hangman is a semi documentary film made up of six short stories about death and disaster, to be directed by Thailand’s Jakrawal Nilthamrong and Romania’s Ionut Piturescu. “We discovered the cultural and stylistic differences between us cause a kind of inspiration friction,” says Piturescu, whose documentary credits include Balkan Love Story and Seize The Time. He also won the 2010 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight award for his short Quest. An art-school graduate whose latest short film, Immortal Woman, was selected for the Tiger Awards competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2011, Nilthamrong says he and his co-director were inspired by the bloodshed during the recent political unrest in Bangkok and the floods which affected the central part of the country. The film will include segments focusing on Thailand’s last executioner, local farmers from Cambodia whose lives were affected by the floods and a group of refugees struggling to survive on the Thailand/Cambodia border. In pre-production with plans to shoot in Thailand, Hangman is a co-production between Thailand’s Extra Virgin (the company with which Nilthamrong works), Romania’s Anthropoesis (with which Piturescu works), and DOX:LAB, the initiator of the project which has put up $17,000. Pimpaka Towira, founder of Bangkok-based production company Extra Virgin, is attached to produce. Her credits include Nilthamrong’s Unreal Forest which came out of the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s 2010 Forget Africa programme, and Uruphong Raksasad’s award-winning Agrarian Utopia. The team will be at HAF looking for funds, co-producers and sales agents for Hangman. Jean Noh Hangman Budget $100,000 Finance raised to date $17,000 from a DOX:LAB grant Contact Patricia Drati patricia@cphdox.dk (Un)Making The Betrayal Dir Dain Said Countries of origin Indonesia-Malaysia Malaysian film-maker Dain Said was not put off directing by the fact his controversial, violent debut Dukun was banned from release. His second feature, Bunohan, went on to world premiere at Toronto last year, where it was praised for its elegant visuals and gritty action; it was picked up internationally by Universal Pictures. Said’s next project is a documentary that aims to deconstruct the consequences of Indonesian propaganda film The Betrayal, which was commissioned by the country’s president, General Suharto, in the 1980s to justify the millions of Indonesians who were massacred following his 1965 coup. Said was inspired during a Nippon Foundation fellowship in 2007, as he researched the historical role of films and propaganda in Indonesia. A graduate of the University of Westminster in London, he also tackled the 1965 era in his final year project Surabaya Johnny, which screened at the London Film Festival in 1989. The new film will feature interviews with ordinary people whose lives were affected by The Betrayal, using footage which Said salvaged from a Jakarta film studio backlot. “What the Indonesian people went through in their history was terribly painful. That a film was made to justify a regime’s brutality just goes to show how powerful film as a communication medium became in the 20th century, the world over,” explains Nandita Solomon, who is producing the documentary through Apparat, the company she set up with Said in 2009. (Un)Making The Betrayal has received grants from Busan’s Asian Cinema Fund and the Netherlands’ Jan Vrijman Fund and was part of last year’s Asian-European training programme for documentary film-makers, Crossing Borders. Currently in pre-production, Said and Solomon will be at HAF seeking funds, co-producers, sales agents and pre-sales. Jean Noh (Un)Making The Betrayal Budget $243,000 Finance raised to date $43,000 from the Asian Cinema Fund, the Jan Vrijman Fund and private funds Contact Nandita Solomon nansolo@gmail.com Music And The Nation Dir Cheung King-wai Country of origin Hong Kong HAF ProFiles One of Hong Kong’s leading documentary film-makers, Cheung has selected Chinese pipa master Fang Jinlong and his all-female band, Sweet Eighteen, as the subject of his upcoming film. Like many mainland Chinese musicians, Fang used to play in a military band where he had no creative freedom but did not have to worry about pay. Now that he has to adapt to capitalist China, he encourages his girls to wear sexy outfits but finds it is still not easy to survive. “Money and art are like tango partners and that’s just as true for documentaries as it is for music,” says Cheung, who was a cellist before he turned to film-making. “I just want to objectively observe how the economic reforms in China are affecting the Chinese people.” Cheung’s documentary credits include KJ: Music And Life, about a piano prodigy, which won three prizes at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards and played for eight months in Hong Kong. His last film, One Nation, Two Cities, about mainland immigrants, premiered at last year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival and opened in Hong Kong theatres on March 16. Cheung has already been following Fang and his band for two years and says he needs another year or two to complete the film. The $1m budget is high by the standards of Hong Kong documentaries because he is following several people across different locations. Cheung also aims to use multiple Red cameras and high-quality sound recording. However, he believes the budget is justified as he is aiming for a theatrical release in both China and Hong Kong. Cheung describes the film as an “ordinary person epic” with commercial appeal, rather than a political critique that could have censorship problems on the mainland. “Chinese people will find themselves in this film,” he says. Liz Shackleton Music And The Nation Budget $1m Finance raised to date None Contact Wong Suet-lee, Beautiful Productions beautiful.prods@gmail.com March 20, 2012 Screen International at Filmart 15 n
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