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).
Also 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 live, work and love on this island we call home” within the yr wherein Singapore celebrates the sixtieth yr of its founding.
Khoo is serving as government producer and inventive director on the anthology via 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 government producers. Zhao Wei’s Tan Fong Cheng can even produce.
Scheduled to start out manufacturing on the finish of April, the $1M movie is supported by Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) and the Singapore Film Commission (SFC).
Kopitiams are a kind of espresso store discovered throughout Southeast Asia and function a artistic place to begin and thematic thread all through the six movies.
“I was sitting in my favourite kopitiam last fall, sipping on my kopi o kosong (black coffee) and eating soft boiled eggs when the idea struck me – an anthology to celebrate Singapore’s 60th anniversary,” Khoo informed Deadline. “My brief to the directors was simply that the title is ‘Kopitiam Days’ – tell a short story from your heart and we let the creative individuals 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 Best International Feature 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 Food Lore. Ong Kuo Sin has labored as an government producer on Tanglin and in addition directed movies together with Golden Horse Award-nominated Number 1.
Khoo, a Cannes common whose final movie as director, Spirit World, closed final yr’s Busan movie competition, says the group goal to premiere the movie in Singapore on the finish of July forward of a world movie competition run. Talks are additionally at present 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 Food 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, Ok. Rajagopal’s A Yellow Bird and Boo Junfeng’s Sandcastle and Apprentice, with the latter three movies all premiering in Cannes. Clover Films 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 Money No Enough 3.