Singapore: Indonesia’s ‘The Hunted’ Sweeps SAFF Project Market

Indonesian filmmaker Delon Tio’s “The Hunted” completed a near sweep of the Southeast Asian Film Financing Project Market awards, winning three of the four prizes on offer.

The project won the Aurora Producing Award that includes S$20,000 (U.S.$15,000) in cash; the Yellow Box Soundscape Award, a post-production prize worth U.S.$15,000 from one of Southeast Asia’s leading music and audio houses; and the RED Digital Cinema Award that provides a 20-day loan of a Red Scarlet-W camera kit worth U.S.$25,000.

The awards were presented in Singapore on Friday. The project market is part of ScreenSingapore, which in turn is part of the Singapore Media Festival.

“Definitely, it will help us to elevate the project by a mile,” Tio told Variety. “I have produced seven features so far, and I have only raised the funding from Indonesia. I have never gone through the step of putting my project in a film market, in a program like SAFF before. It was a very good experience meeting with investors and producers and distributors from other countries. Some of them have shown great interest in the project. We will need funding to reach a certain level of production, because we are not looking at it just as an Indonesian film but at a global level.”

“The Hunted” will follow four girls who wake up after a rave party in Bali to find themselves on an island, pursued by two hunters who have paid big money for the ultimate hunting trophy – human beings. Tio plans to shoot in August 2018.

Philippines producers Bianca Balbuena and Bradley Liew’s “Mina-Anud,” to be directed by cinematographer and documentarian Kerwin G, won the U.S.$10,000 Basecamp Colour Prize for feature film color grading.

“The director has been in the industry for eight years, doing cinematography and other jobs. This is his first feature,” Balbuena and Liew told Variety. “This will be a great push to finally make his dream come true. This is his first project market and he didn’t know that this actually happens, that there is a world outside of Philippines where you can pitch your project, where you have stories and passion and people will listen.”

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