Busan 2014: White Light, VS Service join for Open Sea Fund

Two Bangkok-based film-services companies, film editor Lee Chatametikool's White Light post-production house and the venerable VS Service, have joined to start the Open Sea Fund, which is touted as Southeast Asia's first regional film fund.

Here's more from a press released issued today:

Open Sea Fund is Southeast Asia’s first regional film fund. A pioneering collaboration between White Light and VS Service, Open Sea Fund will initially support two feature film projects per year – one in production and one in post-production.

VS Service will provide a full camera, lighting and grip package for a feature film to be shot in Thailand. White Light will offer a color grading and DCP package for a feature. The deadline for submissions is the end of November 2014, with the aim for projects to be completed in 2015.

“Thailand has profited immensely from being the post-production center of Southeast Asia,” says White Light’s Lee Chatametikool. “With the Open Sea Fund, we want to give back to the region by opening up funding opportunities for both unknown and established Southeast Asian filmmakers.”

“VS has already been active in funding local films, but we were looking for a more comprehensive way for filmmakers to take its projects from production all the way to post,” says VS Service’s Pete Smithsuth. “Our collaboration with White Light is the perfect answer – projects with some funding in place would benefit from our production support and become good candidates for further post-production support.”

Representatives from Open Sea fund will be present at the Busan Film Festival’s Asian Film Market.

For more information contact openseafund@gmail.com.

White Light is a maverick post-house founded five years ago by five leading Thai cinematographers, film editors and post-production supervisors. Recent projects include Hollow by Vietnam's Ham Tran, Men Who Save the World by Malaysia's Liew Seng Tat, The Second Life of Thieves by Malaysia's Woo Ming Jin, Taksu by Japan's Kiki Sugino, Riverof Exploding Durians by Malaysia's Edmund Yeo and As You Were by Singapore's Jiekai Liao, as well as Concrete Clouds, Lee's own directorial debut. He's also a partner in Mosquito Films Distribution, which has added Thieves and Durians to its slate of titles.

VS Service was founded in 1985 and is mostly known for supporting foreign productions, including The Beach, The Hangover Part II, American Gangster and The Rocket. But in the past year or so, VS Service has raised its profile among the indie-film community in Thailand through several initiatives, including a new award at this year's Thai Short Film and Video Festival. It's now headed by second-generation owner Pete Pithai Smithsuth.

Update: The Open Sea Fund has a Facebook page.