Tony Predictions: Best Musical - Four Stand Poised to Give ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ Some Competition It was literally word for word.”Įmmy Predictions: Guest Actress (Drama) - Melanie Lynskey and Anna Torv From 'The Last of Us' Challenging 'Succession' Women Sometimes, I didn’t even have to write dialogue. “During research, we would sit and hide incognito, listening to school assemblies. You see them as these authoritative figures.”Įu says that research and script development were painstaking processes, as well as flashbacks to older times. That was how I felt as well, when I was a kid. The adults in the school are almost caricatures. And so, the way I talk about the adults in the film is very much from the child’s point of view. “Fairy tales talk a lot about patriarchal authority. That made it instinctive to set it in this kind of like once-upon-a-time rural village far, far away.” The ugly duckling who is growing, everyone’s projecting, and realizes that she’s a beautiful swan. Another inspiration is the ugly duckling. We have a lot of these kind of horror-folk tales in Southeast Asia. “A big inspirational point of this film is folktales and fairy tales. Only when she returned to Malaysia and started making short films as an independent did she find her voice and determine what she wanted to say. That in itself is a significant step for Eu, who says that she was unsure of her bi-cultural, bi-racial Malaysian-British identity. So, it’s very exciting to kind of be there and to represent Malaysia.” Not specifically being the first female director, but it has been a long time since Malaysia has been represented in Cannes. But all this big wide world stuff comes from actually going out there and experiencing it, going to the festivals and learning more,” says Eu.Įu says that the film’s Cannes firsts are significant. “What I learned was the basics of cameras and actors. where she had spent many of her teenage years, but she says that academic learning is no substitute for hands-on experience. And through that experience, of course, you end up building a network and learning about film funding as well.”Įu had previously attended film school in the U.K. And eventually we were there with a finished film. It was like, let’s do the script labs, then after that let’s do the project markets. And then I wanted to figure out how to do co-productions. I needed to learn how to write a good script. It was basically just to learn every step of the way, apply to everything so that we could gain more knowledge. “We didn’t even know what the end goal was. So, when I first pitched it to her, we had a plan to do workshops and try to learn as much as we can,” Eu told Variety. It is also big step to move from shorts to a feature film, to produce it and co-produce it. “When we started me and my producer were both very new to the industry. Variety is aware of “Tiger Stripes” having attended: the Locarno festival’s Open Doors program the Network of Asian Fantastic Films at Korea’s BiFan fantasy festival (where it won an award from another genre festival, Sitges) the Talents Tokyo event (where it won the Talents Tokyo Award in 2018, as well as the NMSP Project Development Fund in 2019 the Hubert Bals Fund Bright Future award at the Rotterdam festival the Less is More event backed by France’s Le Group Ouest, by Italy’s Ties that Bind and the (now defunct) SEAFIC Lab in Thailand. “Tiger Stripes” has at least seven project development credits and is officially an eight-territory coproduction involving Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Indonesia and Qatar. Now, with hundreds of festivals having sprouted ‘industry support’ functions, it is more common that a favored film will make three or four such stops. Twenty years ago, when the project market scene was led by Rotterdam’s CineMart, Hong Kong’s HAF, Busan’s PPP and a handful of others, and bursaries were scarcer, projects counted themselves lucky to get one or two invitations. In addition to cash and training, many project markets provide a speed-dating like environment where dozens of one-on-one meetings with potential co-producers, financiers, distributors and festival selectors can be arranged in just two or three days. These are intended to encourage diversity and nurture film-making talent in countries where that is a rarity or where commercial films crowd out more experimental art-house titles. “Tiger Stripes” is also a triumph for the now highly-developed global network of project markets, talent development programs, script and production workshops (often labelled as ‘labs’) and grant schemes.
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