IFP NO BORDERS NEARS - PHANG BLOGS 

I'm Jennifer Phang, a writer-director currently blogging out of New York, about one day before No Borders. For twitter-lovers, I am now twitterable as HalfLifeJen. Our No Borders project is called Look For Water, a screenplay based on Dominic Mah's stageplay. It's a unique story, part romantic comedy, part paranormal thriller. Included here on the right is a pre-vis (pre-visualization) image from our look book. Dominic and I are long-time collaborators and are adapting the script together. I am directing, and we now have on board two producers I have worked with before: Producer Reuben Lim and co-executive producer Robert Chang (two of our big movers and shakers from our first feature together, Half-Life). Reuben is our primary representative at No Borders.

A little context: I'm actually prepping for No Borders after a bout of detail work with the marketing art and new trailer for Half-Life (coming out in December through Wolfe Releasing, and simultaneously through Warner Brothers Digital). It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and is still finishing a pretty extensive domestic and international tour. I've included a frame from the film here and our facebook page also has updates and behind the scenes pictures. Hand in hand with Visit Films, we have been presenting the film in Tokyo, Germany, London, Turkey, Korea, Sydney, and beyond. I head to Taipei in October where Half-Life closes the Taiwan Women Makes Waves Film Festival and I will speak on the Diaspora in the Work of Chinese Female Filmmakers panel.

Now to answer a few important questions about IFW and No Borders:

What are your goals going to Independent Film Week?
Save the spirit of independent film (probably will require help). Also to explore further potential for co-production, financing and casting to bring Look For Water to its full heartbreaking, norm-challenging, poetic and transformative potential.

How do you feel about your prospects?
Triple-Pumped. I'm of course grateful to be expanding my understanding of the market at a different level. We're respectfully optimistic about our prospects because we've gotten good reactions everywhere we've brought the script so far. Took script to the very inspiring Sundance Labs, won two big awards at the wonderful Tribeca All Access, and most recently were granted an Annenberg Fellowship from Sundance. To get invited to No Borders really made this an encouraging year for our project (and we are really grateful to Reuben Lim, Sundance's Anne Lai, and the IFP's Amy Dotson for seeing our film into this week.) I've been around the market before, but coveted the No Borders' candle-lit cocktail parties with the even-more-exotic food.

Are you nervous?
Not so much. Meeting new people is really enjoyable to me. Hopefully the hard part is taken care of by the No Borders format. If the people we are scheduled to meet with have looked at our materials ahead of time, then it usually becomes more of an opportunity for getting to know each other and our work. If no, then it's storytelling time. The challenge in talking about our project is conveying the myriad interesting and fun aspects of our story without looking like a madman, since it's really a multi-layered, genre-morphing movie.

# posted by Jennifer Phang @ 9/17/2009 11:04:00 PM

Comments (0)

Post a Comment