APM - Asian Project Market

 

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Director’s Profile

The Mo Brothers, Timo Tjahjanto and Kimo Stamboel, met in Sydney in 2002, since when they have been making short films together. They both graduated from the School of Visual Arts in Sydney, taking film production course. In 2004, Timo journeyed to New York to pursue freelance work while taking a yearlong directing course at the New York Film Academy, while Kimo went back to Indonesia to start his production company. Eventually in 2007, they worked together to bring something new and fresh to the Indonesian film Industry. They focused on Horror and Thriller genre. Under the moniker of The Mo Brothers, Timo and Kimo finished a feature film-prototype short film titled Dara (2007), and the film traveled to various genre oriented film festivals around the globe. By 2008, they shot what would eventually be lauded as the first true South East Asian slasher film titled Macabre (a.k.a. Rumah Dara, 2009). It aimed to bring freshness to the local horror film market, which then put too much focus on upernatural powers.

Synopsis

Nomura, a man in his early thirties, lives successfully in Tokyo, Japan. Girls like him and he likes being in their company, however, none of them realizes the true sinister identity behind his clean cut façade. Nomura has been leaving a legacy of violent murders that he immortalizes through video clips that he posts in a public video website. He revels on the sight and fact that millions of people have been witness through his virally spread videos. Thousands of miles away from him, in a whole different world, lives Bayu, a disgraced investigative journalist living in a violent and unstable Jakarta, Indonesia. As Bayu’s life is hit by the nadir of failures, he starts to take cue from Nomura’s videos that create an alter ego of a vigilante serial killer who records his own brand of “justified” killings. Nomura’s seemingly confident and controlled charm starts to peel when his ego is wounded by the fact that Bayu’s videos have reached a
significant numbers of followers that could rival his own. Complicating matters further is Nomura’s bizarre attraction towards a traumatized young florist Hisae. Bayu himself starts to sink deeper into a spiral of violence; obsessed to bring down one of the country’s biggest corruptor leaving a series of bloody rampage, not realizing the repercussion towards his young daughter Elly. As chaos unfurl a rivalry between Nomura and Bayu develops into an uncontrollable psychosis, impacting on the people surrounding them. Nomura’s eventual peak of Mayhem will find himself traveling to a country he never know of, confronting Bayu, sending both into a climatic clash.

Achievements

2014 Sundance Film Festival
2014 Sydney Film Festival
2014 New Zealand International Film Festival
2014 Denver International Film Festival
Released in Japan, Singapore

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