Co-Producing Vietnamese Cinema: Don’t Cry, Butterfly and Viet and Nam

 

With the Director of Don’t Cry, Butterfly, and the Co-Producers of Viet and Nam, this panel shines the spotlight on two independently-coproduced Vietnamese-language films screening at TIFF. The panel will discuss the challenges, opportunities, joys and tears of navigating inter-Asia and Asia-Europe co-production and international film festival circuits.

 

Moderated by Elizabeth Wijaya, Associate Producer of Viet and Nam.

 

 

Weijie Lai is a film producer based in Singapore and Toronto, Canada. In 2010 he co-founded E&W Films, a Singapore-based film development and production company with Elizabeth Wijaya. He is the producer of POP AYE (2017), awarded at Sundance, Rotterdam, and Zurich, Taste (2021), awarded at Berlinale, Taipei, Asia Pacific Screen Awards, and Jogja-NETPAC, and Mongrel (2024), awarded the Caméra d’Or Special Mention at the Cannes Film Festival. As co-producer, his credits include Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (2021), winner of the Golden Leopard at Locarno, Cu Li Never Cries (2024), winner of GWFF Best First Feature Award at Berlinale, and Viet and Nam (2024), selected in Un Certain Regard, Cannes Film Festival. Weijie has several years of experience as a senior programmer formerly at the Singapore International Film Festival, developing its film academy and overseeing its Asian selection. He has served on the selection committee for several fund bodies.

 

Nguyen Thi Xuan Trang graduated from university in 2007 and started her first job as a producer of TV series, TV advertisements, promotional clips, and short films. In 2014, Trang joined the Kyoto Filmmaker Lab held by the Kyoto Museum in Japan, producing independent short films, docuementary projects, and feature projects. In 2018, Trang co-produced the experimental documentary Tree House, which was a co-production between Vietnam, France, Singapore, and Chine. Tree House was selected and featured in the Locarno Film Festival in 2019. Trang further participated in the Bucheon Fantastic Film School in Korea where she co-produced projects in 2019. She continued onto the Open Door Lab of Locarno in 2021. She has been broadening her horizons by joining an international community of filmmakers and producers/ In 2023, she continued her collaboration with Trương Minh Quý in the nine-nation co-production of Viet and Nam. This film was subsequently nominated for the Un-Certain Regard in the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

 

Linh Duong is a Vietnamese filmmaker who takes special interest in the unconventional depiction of sad, angsty and naggy middle-aged women. Her series of shorts, which seamlessly blend hyper-realistic, slice-of-life subject matters with magical realism elements deeply rooted in South East Asian mythology and superstitions, have been competing and winning awards at prestigious film festivals around the world. Her debut feature, DON’T CRY, BUTTERFLY, is in competition at Venice Critics' Week 2024. Linh is also an alumni of the Berlinale Talents, Asian Film Academy, Locarno Summer Academy and Bucheon Fantastic Film School.

 

Elizabeth Wijaya is the Director of the Southeast Asia Seminar Series, at the Asian Institute, and an Assistant Professor in both the Department of Visual Studies and the Cinema Studies Institute. In 2010 she co-founded E&W Films, a Singapore-based film development and production company with Weijie Lai. Wijaya works at the intersection of cinema, philosophy, and area studies. She is especially interested in the material and symbolic entanglements between East Asia and Southeast Asia cinema. Her work emphasizes a multimethodological approach, which is attentive to media forms, ethnographic detail, material realities, archival practices, international networks, and interdisciplinary modes of theorization. She received her PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where she was affiliated with the East and Southeast Asian Programs.