UTM producers set to make their Cannes debut with two films
It’s a premiere many filmmakers only dream of: Two films by University of Toronto Mississauga department of visual studies professor Elizabeth Wijaya and Cinema Studies instructor Weijie Lai will debut at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.
The couple are co-founders of the development and production company E&W Films, whose award-winning titles include Taste, Pop Aye and Cu Li Never Cries, which won best first feature at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival in February.
At the world-famous film festival on the French Riviera, the E&W Films-led production Mongrel, which Lai worked on as producer and Wijaya as co-producer, will premiere in the Director’s Fortnight section. Chiang Wei Liang’s debut feature tells the story of Oom, an undocumented migrant who works as a caregiver in the mountains of rural Taiwan. It is E&W Films’ third project with the Taiwan-based Singaporean filmmaker.
Director Trương Minh Quý’s Việt and Nam, meanwhile, is an eight-country co-production shot on 16mm film, with Lai serving as co-producer and Wijaya as associate producer. The film has been selected to compete in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard — a category dedicated to non-traditional stories and styles that has previously recognized titles like Force Majeure and Dogtooth, both which went on to become breakthrough international hits.
Việt and Nam follows two lovers, one from the North and the other from the South, on a mission that explores the dreams and trauma of the country’s children.
“I would say both films this year are heavy, but they have very distinct artistic visions,” Wijaya says. “With everything we work on under E&W Films, we look out for that sense of directorial vision or artistic voice.”
The pair met, fittingly, in an undergraduate philosophy and film course at the National University of Singapore. E&W Films began for practical reasons; they needed somewhere to hold funds while raising money to make Lai’s thesis film project. Afterward, because they had registered the company and gained some fundraising experience, E&W Films produced a short project for one of their undergrad schoolmates, director Kirsten Tan. Then, they moved on to produce the filmmaker’s debut feature, which won a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. From there, E&W Films’ output snowballed, with more than a dozen productions to date.
While they recognize there are many different kinds of film producers, Wijaya generally defines her roles as development, strategy and coordination, whereas Lai is more hands-on, coming on board early to help facilitate everything from ideation through scripting, fundraising, production, sales and distribution.
Beyond their teaching and scholarship, the couple’s dedication to film media has enriched the department of visual studies, where they’ve built the UTM Asian Short Film Collection (accessible to anyone with a U of T library account) and organized the UTM DVS filmmaker-in-residence program, which has welcomed international talents such as Davy Chou, Pimpaka Towira and Anocha Suwichakornpong to campus for workshops, lectures and screenings.
Two projects currently in development by E&W Films have also received UTM funding. An eco-horror directed by Gogularaajan Rajendran was awarded an Office of the Vice-Principal Black, Indigenous, and/or Racialized Scholar Research Grant, and The Sea is Calm Tonight by filmmaker Lê Bảo was given seed support by the UTM Research and Scholarly Activity Fund.
With Cannes just on the horizon, the opportunity the film festival represents is enormous. “It's the biggest international market in terms of the number of attendees,” Lai says. “The most number of critics internationally are there. The most number of distributors are there and sales agents and things like that … So if you're there, in theory, more people will watch your film.”
Although E&W Films has attended the festival professionally for years, this is the first time their work has been selected for screening there.
“I think I’m excited just to see the first reactions,” Wijaya says.
“By the time we get to the world premiere, you've seen the film so many times that you’re actually bored stiff,” Lai says. “But for some reason, when you're sitting there with a fresh audience during the world premiere … the feeling is always different. You feel the energy of the audience, and fingers crossed the energy is good.”
