HAF PROFILES


Ali’s Wedding Dir Tony Ayres Country of origin Australia


China-born, Australia-based director Tony Ayres is clearly drawn to true stories. His award winning 2007 film Home Song Stories — which premiered at that year’s Berlin International Film Festival — was based loosely on his own life story, while his latest project, Ali’s Wed- ding, is a romantic comedy based on the real-life tale of Iranian actor Osamah Sami who moved to Australia aged 12, where his father became a respected leader of Melbourne’s Muslim community. Ayres directed Sami in his 2008 television movie


Saved, and after hearing his life story, encouraged the actor to pull it together in a script, bringing on television writer Andrew Knight as a co-writer. Sami also plays the lead in Ali’s Wedding, as a man


who tries to live up to his father’s image but becomes tangled in a web of lies after he falls in love with a Leba- nese girl, despite being pledged to an arranged marriage. “This is a story about Muslims that does not involve


terrorism or suicide bombers,” says Ayres, whose first feature, Walking On Water, won a Teddy award at Berlin in 2002. “It is about ordinary people, has a lot of humour and humanity and is set in a world we don’t know about and don’t get to see. There are not many accessible Mus- lim stories predominantly in English,” adds the film- maker, who thinks the film has the potential to reach wider audiences despite its cultural specifity. Ali’s Wedding is being produced by Michael McMahon


and Helen Panckhurst of Matchbox Pictures, the com- pany behind controversial Australian television series The Slap, on which Ayres was also a showrunner and director. With a view to shooting up to 20% of the project in the Middle East, the film-making team will be looking for co-producers at HAF.


Sandy George Ali’s Wedding


Budget $5.6m Raised to date $2m via the Australian government’s producer offset tax rebate Contact Helen Panckhurst


helen.panckhurst@


matchboxpictures.com n 8 Screen International at Filmart March 21, 2012


Chocolate City GZ


Budget $1.6m Finance raised to date $500,000 Contact Ruby Yang, Chang Ai Media Project yangrubyzy@gmail.com


Here Comes The Sun


Budget $1.8m Raised to date none Contact Green Productions noa@greenproductions.co.il


Chocolate City GZ Dir Ruby Yang Country of origin China-Hong Kong


After directing several award-winning documentaries, including the 2006 Oscar-winning short The Blood Of Yingzhou District, Chinese-American film-maker Ruby Yang is taking a different direction with her first fiction feature. The story will follow the lives of three young Africans living in the Sanyuanli district of Chinese city Guangzhou, named by taxi drivers as ‘Chocolate City’. “For me, the young Africans in the Chocolate City are


just like the Chinese Americans in San Francisco 160 years ago. They are marginalised but still try to make it in a foreign land, at their prime age,” explains Yang. “Being an immigrant in the US and having made films about the earliest Chinese Americans, I feel I understand the solitude of the African community,” adds the director, who will draw on her documentary work and experience as an editor to create a hard-hitting doc style with fast- paced editing and a vivid visual look. Yang is currently writing the script for Chocolate City


GZ, and is planning to recruit name actors from Africa, as well as Nigerian scriptwriters to add touches of authenticity to the project. She is producing together with regular collaborator Lambert Yam, who worked on three of her documentaries: Citizen Hong Kong, China 21 and A Moment In Time. Chocolate City GZ is being produced through Yang’s


Chang Ai Media Project, which she set up in 2003 to make films that raise awareness of HIV and Aids in China. With $500,000 of investment promised by an undisclosed US-based investor, Yang will be looking for co-production partners at HAF.


Sen-lun Yu


Here Comes The Sun Dir Eitan Anner Country of origin Israel


Here Comes The Sun is being pitched as Israel’s answer to revisionist US westerns such as Little Big Man and Unfor- given. “It wasn’t born as an Israeli western, but during the writing process we understood that the story is a classic story,” says writer Guy Meirson of the film to be directed by Israeli film-maker Eitan Anner, whose last feature Love And Dance was distributed in more than 20 countries. The film centres around an engineer in his early 40s


who returns to Israel with his American wife, after 20 years living in the US, to build a solar field on Bedouin land, encountering suspicion from the locals. “The subject is the relationship between west and


east… Israel lies right in the middle. It sees itself as a western society but at the same time, it has more than a little bit in common with the Third World,” explains Meirson, who wrote from personal experience as he him- self returned to Israel after several years in the US. Having already collaborated on television series Room


Service, Meirson and Eitan Anner were keen to make a feature. After winning a pitching prize for the project at the Haifa International Film Festival last October, they were bombarded with offers from producers wanting to work on the project. They opted for young, ambitious outfit Green Productions, founded by Gal Greenspan and Roi Kurland in 2009 and a first draft of the screen- play, which will be in English and Hebrew, has been sub- mitted to the Israeli Film Fund. The project is looking to attract a co-producer from an


English-speaking territory. Greenspan is also open to producing with Asian partners. He has fond memories of a visit to HAF in 2010 with Israeli director Tom Shoval’s thriller Youth, which is now fully financed and set to shoot shortly.


Geoffrey Macnab


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