Bangkok-based film fund Purin Pictures has announced the five projects that will receive grants in its spring 2022 funding round, including the first animated feature that the fund has supported.
Directed by the Philippines’ Carl Joseph Papa, horror-fantasy rotoscope animation, The Missing, will receive a Purin Pictures production grant. The five grantees, split between production and post-production grants, also include documentaries Magnetic Letters, from the Philippines’ Demie Dangla, and One Big Sumba Family, from Indonesia’s Tonny Trimarsanto.
The two remaining live-action narrative projects – Sorayos Prapapan’s Arnold Is A Model Student (Thailand, pictured above) and Daniel Hui’s Small Hours Of The Night (Singapore) – are both anticipated new works from two filmmakers with a promising track record (see full details of the five projects below).
Purin Pictures co-director Aditya Assarat said: “In Carl Joseph Papa’s The Missing, we are excited to support an animated film for the first time. Maybe because of their higher budgets, feature animations are pretty rare in Southeast Asian independent cinema.”
Launched in 2017 under the Purin Foundation, Purin Pictures is a non-profit film fund that supports independent cinema in Southeast Asia. The call for entries for the fund’s autumn 2022 session opens on August 1.
PRODUCTION GRANTS:
[$30,000 in cash for fiction, $15,000 in cash for documentary]
Magnetic Letters
Director: Demie Dangla, Producer: Philippe Djivas, Pabelle Manikan, Production Company: Pabelle Film Production (Philippines)
A documentary based on decades-old “letters” recorded on cassette tapes between Filipino overseas migrant workers and their families and loved ones back home.
The Missing
Director: Carl Joseph Papa, Producer: Geo Lomuntad, Production Company: Project 8 Projects (Philippines)
A horror-fantasy rotoscope animation about Eric, a mouthless man who is forced to confront an alien haunting his present life while untangling his dark past.
POST-PRODUCTION GRANTS:
[$50,000 in services for fiction, $30,000 in services for documentary]
Arnold Is A Model Student
Director: Sorayos Prapapan, Producer: Donsaron Kovitvanicha, Production Company: Minimal Animal (Thailand)
A drama about Arnold, a high school senior, who gets involved in a scam to cheat the entrance exams to a prestigious military school in Bangkok.
Small Hours Of The Night
Director: Daniel Hui, Producer: Tan Bee Thiam, Production Company: 13 Little Pictures (Singapore)
A drama with two characters: a woman is interrogated by a man over one long night revealing the story of a bizarre tombstone trial in 1980s Singapore.
One Big Sumba Family
Director: Tonny Trimarsanto, Producer: Mandy Marahimin, John Badalu, Production Company: Tanakhir Films (Indonesia)
A documentary about Martha and her father-in-law MD Raya, a village elder in Sumba, who has 12 wives, 52 children, and 220 grandchildren.