EXCLUSIVE: Singapore producer, director and showrunner Eric Khoo is placing collectively an anthology movie, Kopitiam Days, with six native administrators together with Locarno Golden Leopard winner Yeo Siew Hua (A Land Imagined).
Additionally directing segments of the movie are Shoki Lin, M. Raihan Halim, Tan Siyou, Don Aravind and Ong Kuo Sin. Khoo says the six segments will discover “what it means to stay, work and love on this island we name dwelling” within the yr by which Singapore celebrates the sixtieth yr of its founding.
Khoo is serving as govt producer and artistic director on the anthology by way of his Singapore-based manufacturing home Zhao Wei Films, with Fran Borgia, founding father of Singapore’s Akanga Film Asia, and Lim Teck, managing director of Singapore producer-distributor Clover Films, additionally on board as govt producers. Zhao Wei’s Tan Fong Cheng may even produce.
Scheduled to start out manufacturing on the finish of April, the $1M movie is supported by Infocomm Media Growth Authority (IMDA) and the Singapore Movie Fee (SFC).
Kopitiams are a sort of espresso store discovered throughout Southeast Asia and function a inventive place to begin and thematic thread all through the six movies.
“I used to be sitting in my favorite kopitiam final fall, sipping on my kopi o kosong (black espresso) and consuming tender boiled eggs when the thought struck me – an anthology to rejoice Singapore’s sixtieth anniversary,” Khoo advised Deadline. “My transient to the administrators was merely that the title is ‘Kopitiam Days’ – inform a brief story out of your coronary heart and we let the inventive people take it from there.”
Yeo Siew Hua additionally lately directed Stranger Eyes, which premiered at Venice movie competition, whereas M. Raihan Halim’s credit embody La Luna, Singapore’s entry for Greatest Worldwide Function at this yr’s Oscars. Shoki Lin has directed a number of shorts which have performed at worldwide festivals, together with Adam, which was chosen for Cannes Cinefondation in 2019, whereas Tan Siyou is engaged on her first function, Amoeba.
Don Aravind works between movie, sequence and commercials, together with long-running Singapore sequence Tanglin and an episode of HBO Asia’s Meals Lore. Ong Kuo Sin has labored as an govt producer on Tanglin and in addition directed movies together with Golden Horse Award-nominated No 1.
Khoo, a Cannes common whose final movie as director, Spirit World, closed final yr’s Busan movie competition, says the workforce purpose to premiere the movie in Singapore on the finish of July forward of a global movie competition run. Talks are additionally at the moment underway to launch the movie on a worldwide streaming platform later this yr. Khoo was additionally a showrunner on HBO Asia sequence anthologies Folklore (2018) and Meals Lore (2019), in addition to the second season of Folklore in 2021.
Borgia has producing credit together with Stranger Eyes, Chia Chee Sum’s Oasis Of Now, which premiered in Busan New Currents final yr, Okay. Rajagopal’s A Yellow Fowl and Boo Junfeng’s Sandcastle and Apprentice, with the latter three movies all premiering in Cannes. Clover Movies is a number one Southeast Asian distributor and has additionally produced greater than 20 movies together with Khoo’s Ramen Teh, Royston Tan’s 12 Lotus and Jack Neo’s Cash No Sufficient 3.
