The Asian Project Market (APM), which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, will return as an on-site event at the Busan Exhibition and Convention Centre (Bexco), running from October 9-11 during the Asian Contents & Film Market.
Among the 29 projects selected for APM this year, two are works-in-progress: Gaspar by Indonesian director Yosep Anggi Noen and Last Shadow At First Light by Nicole Midori Woodford from Singapore. Both projects are in post-production.
The lineup also comprises three projects supported with script development grants by the Asian Cinema Fund (ACF), which reopened its funding initiative this year after the pandemic: Iranian director Raha Amirfazli’s In The Land Of Brothers, Life I Stole by Malaysian director Putri Purnama Sugua and Smart City by India’s Rohin Raveendran Nair. Each project received a cash grant of $7,000 (krw10m) and an invitation to APM.
Screen profiles the five titles here.
Works-in-progress
Gaspar (Indonesia)
Dir. Yosep Anggi Noen
Prods. Yulia Evina Bhara, Cristian Imanuell
Production companies: KawanKawan Media, Visinema
Budget: $850,000 ($800,000 secured)
Adapted from an award-winning novel by Sabda Armandio, Gaspar centres on a detective in a near-future apocalyptic Indonesia where humanity is suffering. “A detective is an interesting job because the profession doesn’t exist in Indonesia,” says director Yosep Anggi Noen. “Therefore I can create a brand-new world that is dark.”
Yosep cites Alfonso Cuaron’s Children Of Men as a touchstone for Gaspar, which received a pre-production grant from Indonesia’s Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy. The shoot, which lasted 36 days, took place in the Javanese city of Semarang, which retains Dutch colonial architecture with a heavy touch of dystopia. The cast is led by Reza Rahadian, Shenina Cinnamon and Laura Basuki, winner of the Berlinale Silver Bear this year for best supporting performance in Before, Now & Then (Nana).
Indonesia’s Yosep has previously directed Solo, Solitude and The Science Of Fictions, which played at Locarno in 2019. Both of those films were also produced by Yulia Evina Bhara, whose credits include Autobiography, which this year played in Venice’s Horizons section.
Contact Yulia Evina Bhara, producer
Last Shadow At First Light (Sing-Jap-Slovenia)
Dir. Nicole Midori Woodford
Prods. Jeremy Chua, Shozo Ichiyama, Bostjan Virc, Tomohiko Seki
Production companies: Potocol, Fourier Films, Studio Virc, cogitoworks
Budget: $700,000 ($600,000 secured)
This debut feature tracks a 16-year-old girl from Singapore, who embarks on a road trip to look for her mother in post-tsunami northeast Japan. “I am curious about the ideas of hidden trauma and survival skills,” says Singapore director Nicole Midori Woodford, whose late Japanese grandmother had a close shave with the atomic bomb in the Second World War.
Before the pandemic, Woodford and her team made three research and scouting trips to Japan’s northeast. “This state of a whole land in transition depicts the weight of the past confronting the promise of the future,” says producer Jeremy Chua, whose credits include Bui Thac Chuyen’s Glorious Ashes, which premieres this year in Tokyo International Film Festival’s main competition. Shot by Hideho Urata (Plan 75), Last Shadow At First Light is in post-production with a cast headed by Masatoshi Nagase (Sweet Bean), Mariko Tsutsui (A Girl Missing), Peter Yu (A Land Imagined) and newcomer Mihaya Shirata. The backers include Purple Tree Content, Hello Group, Singapore Film Commission and the Slovenian Film Centre.
Woodford has been directing short films for more than a decade, and helmed a season two episode of HBO’s Folklore (titled ‘The Excursion’) that premiered at Tokyo last year.
Contact Ryo Ebe, 108 Media
Asian Cinema Fund’s script development grant recipients
In The Land Of Brothers (Fr-Iran-Neth)
Dir. Raha Amirfazli
Prods. Adrien Barrouillet, Raha Amirfazli, Alireza Ghasemi, Frank Hoeve
Production companies: Furyo Films, The Sixth Side, Baldr Film
Budget: $550,000 ($340,000 secured)
This first feature by Iranian director Raha Amirfazli focuses on the hardships faced by Afghan refugees in Iran. Told in four chapters, the film is set in four cities and spans four time periods from 1991 to 2020. Amirfazli will cast non-professional actors from the Afghan Hazara community.
“It’s about the intimacy of family circles and damage outside pressures and discriminations do to them,” says Amirfazli. “At its core, it is about how the characters lead their individual and collective battles for survival and for love, at their own scale.”
French producer Adrien Barrouillet says that international co-productions with Iran are difficult in the current climate. Nevertheless, the project has received support from Aide aux Cinémas du Monde, CICLIC, Netherlands Film Fund, the Asian Cinema Fund and private funding from Iran. Asghar Farhadi’s longtime editor Hayedeh Safiyari is attached. Amirfazli, who has made several short films, is studying for an MFA at New York University.
Contact Furyo Films
Life I Stole (Malaysia)
Dir. Putri Purnama Sugua
Prod. Tan Cher Kian
Production companies: Dream To Fly, Siring Siring Production
Budget: $300,000
Malaysian director Putri Purnama Sugua grew up living with the undocumented community in Sabah, East Malaysia, which has always been at the heart of her short fiction films and documentaries. With her feature debut Life I Stole, Sugua says she “intends to dig deeper into the statelessness as a humanity issue that always got swept under the rug amid the complexities and intricacies of the political and power struggle among parties with vested interest”.
The story follows an 11-year-old undocumented boy who wants to live his perfect life with his dream girl, only to be forced into identity theft. The characters will be played by real-life undocumented children. The project is supported by the Asian Cinema Fund and won a cash prize sponsored by National Film Development Corporation Malaysia for the most promising project at the Next New Wave workshop.
Producer Tan Cher Kian also worked on two of Sugua’s award-winning short films, Here I Am and The House Without A Ground.
Contact Tan Cher Kian, producer
Smart City (India)
Dir. Rohin Raveendran Nair
Prod. Vikramaditya Motwane
Production company: Andolan Films
Budget: $750,000
Based on his own mental trauma suffered during the Covid-19 lockdown, Indian director Rohin Raveendran Nair describes his feature debut as “an emotionally dense survival horror”. It is about a young mall manager who seeks to rekindle his connection with humanity while being cooped up inside a small flat in a gated Mumbai high-rise.
“I decided to portray my pandemic experience through the lens of horror as during that period I started to recognise the potential for horror in even the most usual everyday objects,” explains Nair, adding that even seemingly normal people can lose their mental balance. He cites as an example a couple who murdered their two daughters in early 2021 in southern India.
Smart City will be in a similar vein to Nair’s 2024, a 60-minute dystopian thriller about a lethal virus that wreaks havoc in Mumbai. That film was shot on a OnePlus mobile phone and is now available on Disney+ Hotstar in India.
Vikramaditya Motwane produces through Andolan Films, which also produced 2024 and Nair’s award-winning LGBTQ+ short The Booth. Motwane is the showrunner and co-director on Sacred Games, Netflix’s first Indian original series, on which Nair served as second-unit director.
Contact Arya Menon, Andolan Films
No comments yet