Lê Bảo
Director
Weijie Lai
Producer
Vietnam
Country
Logline
At sea, Vietnamese boat people of 40 years past have a miraculous meeting with Rohingya refugees of the present in their extraordinary parallel journeys to find peace.
Lê Bảo
Lê Bảo was born in 1990. His interest in cinema began when he was a little boy looking through the small window of his house that sits by the river in the slums of Saigon. A self-trained cinephile, he learnt about cinema through watching foreign films on his computer and made his first short film when he was 20 years old, borrowing an old camera from a friend. His short films Coal and Scent were shot in the underdeveloped areas where he grew up. Taste, his first feature, is also shot with non-professional actors in the places he has known all his life.
Lai Weijie
Lai Weijie is a film producer based in Singapore and Toronto. In 2010 he co-founded E&W Films, a Singapore-based film development and production company, the producer of POP AYE (2017) by Kirsten Tan which received awards at Sundance, Rotterdam, and Zurich, Taste (2021) by Lê Bảo, that received the Special Jury Award in the Encounters section of the Berlinale, and co-producer of Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (2021), winner of the Golden Leopard in Locarno.
Upcoming projects include CNC Development Award recipient Mongrel by Chiang Wei Liang, developed at the Cannes Residence, Talents Tokyo, and TorinoFilmLab ScriptLab. Weijie has several years of experience as a senior programmer formerly at the Singapore International Film Festival, developing its film academy and overseeing its Asian selection. He has served on the selection committee for several fund bodies.