Edmund Yeo

The CPH:DOX international documentary film festival, held in Copenhagen, Denmark, is one of the most prestigious and well-known documentary festivals around. Every year, as part of the festival, the CPH:LAB (formerly known as DOX:LAB) is held where 20 directors around the world are invited to attend workshops and classes. These 20 directors are paired up so that they can make an audiovisual project together, it can be a feature-length film, a short film, a documentary, a video installation etc. This year, I was one of the 20 directors who was given the opportunity to participate in this. (and I'm paired up with the Croatian director Sonja Tarokic)

Hm, the short film's been online since early last year but I've never posted about it. Speaks a lot about how low-profile I am, yeah? Anyway, this is GIRL IN THE WATER, a 2011 short film co-directed by Ming Jin and Danish director Jeppe Ronde as part of a collaborative project set up by CPH: DOX (that's the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival), I was one of the producers and editors. GIRL IN THE WATER stars the Thai actress Sajee Apiwong and chronicles the plight of a young Thai woman who got washed upon the shores of Malaysia.

I have just spent three nights in Tokyo to attend the CineMalaysia Film Festival シネ・マレーシア , a great film festival organized in Tokyo to show Malaysian films. This was its inaugural edition. The film festival ran from the 24th to the 31st of May. I was around for the last two days.

Last night, I received this very unexpected and wonderful news that Jeppe Ronde and Woo Ming Jin's GIRL IN THE WATER, a 20-minute short that I helped to produce and edit, had won the BEST SHORT FILM Award at the Robert Awards (the Danish Oscars) !

On the 27th of January, after being much better-rested, I did the second Q and A session for LAST FRAGMENTS OF WINTER and GIRL IN THE WATER moderated by Paolo Bertolin. This one's pretty long since a kindly audience member was willing to help me film the entire session! The entire thing lasted for more than half an hour... which was, er, actually longer than the running time of LAST FRAGMENTS OF WINTER (23 minutes), but I trimmed it down to spare your eyes and ears. I talked quite a bit about both short films, anecdotes during the film shoot and many others. Here's the video .

I got back from Rotterdam yesterday after spending three nights at the festival. Everything was like a blur, my stay there was so brief (last year, I spent a week in Rotterdam before heading off to Clermont-Ferrand for another week). Already, I'm prepping for a short film shoot in the next few days. Arriving at Rotterdam in the early morning of Jan 26th, I immediately had to prepare myself for the first festival screening in the afternoon. Not a lot of rest there.

After only a few days in Malaysia to celebrate Chinese New Year, I'm flying off again in less than 24 hours to Netherlands for the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Both my short film LAST FRAGMENTS OF WINTER (making its European premiere) and another, GIRL IN THE WATER by Danish director Jeppe Ronde and my regular collaborator Woo Ming Jin ("THE TIGER FACTORY", "WOMAN ON FIRE LOOKS FOR WATER"), which I helped to produce and edit, will part of the WAITING FOR SNOW IN MY KAMPONG program.

Back in June, I was involved in a Danish-Malaysian short film co-production tentatively titled GIRL IN THE WATER. (read about the film shoot here and here )

After going through the first three days of the shoot from the 3rd to the 5th of June (chronicled yesterday ). We all knew that the worst was over. It was an exhausting shoot, insanely high temperature, merciless mosquitoes, seasickness, unpredictable conditions and the like. Filmmaking, some should remember, is a high-stress job that involves a lot of dealing with people, especially if you are shooting under circumstances where you need the cooperation from the locals at the locations of your shoot. 6th of June came. This was scheduled to be the last day of the shoot. Fern the lead actress drew a caricature of me. It's not everyday you have the lead actress of a film you're doing drawing a caricature of yourself.

I was at Cherating in the past week for the film shoot of the tentatively-titled GIRL X (or GIRL IN THE WATER), a Danish-Malaysian co-production co-directed by my regular collaborator, Malaysian filmmaker Woo Ming Jin, and the Danish filmmaker Jeppe Ronde. (you might remember from here and here that I was doing some location scouting two weeks ago) We even imported the Thai actress Sajee "FERN" Apiwong (last seen in Aditya Assarat's HI-SO) to do the main role. It was a short film, but it was a short film with sky-high ambition. After all, I wouldn't involve myself in anything less than awesome anyway. Tuesday. 1st of June. Jeppe arrived in Malaysia at night. Wednesday. 2nd of June. Ming Jin, Jeppe and I picked up Fern and her friend So from the airport before heading straight to Cherating. After a looooong 4-hour car ride, we reached the location, and immediately we headed off to check out the spots.

The second day of the location scouting began with sheer epic magnificence. We went through an area to seek some photogenic wilderness.

The day began with an epic breakfast at Ming Jin's house.

After finishing my latest short film late last month in the sound studios of Honjo (Japan), and a brief stint at the Jeonju International Film Fest, I had returned to Malaysia and went through a relatively idyllic lifestyle.