Filipino filmmaker Eduardo ‘Dodo’ Dayao’s newest project Dear Wormwood has won the IFFAM Project Market’s award for “Best Project” held at the International Film Festival & Awards Macao this Sunday, December 8.

Securing the IFFAM Project Market’s highest award and $15,000, Dayao said, “I am very excited because it means we are on the right track with the film and all our hard work has been paid off so far.” Patti Lapus and Bradley Liew, the producers of Dear Wormwood, accompanied Dayao in receiving the award.

The film, currently in advanced development, has secured $85,000 of it’s proposed $525,000 budget according to Deadline.com. Dayao hopes to start shooting towards the end of next year.

Dear Wormwood tells the story of five women who live together in a forest where a mystery illness and cataclysmic events strike. Dayao himself describes his project as “a tropical sci-fi botanical apocalypse, a south-east Asian cosmic horror film” as well as a “Lovecraftian cosmic horror that seems like a tonal fit for our times.”

The project will be Dayao’s third film. His debut project Violator received acclaim and won various awards, most notably ‘Best Picture’ for the Cinema One Originals Digital Film Festival. 

Photo from the IFFAM website.

Dayao’s film competed against 13 other projects to claim the top prize. Among them, Everybody Leaves, another Filipino production by director Phyllis Grande and producer Alemberg Ang. Everybody Leaves is one of the three female-directed Auteur projects chosen in the IFFAM Project Market.

The IFFAM Project Market, held this year from December 6-8 as part of the fourth International Film Festival & Awards Macao, gives a platform for rising international filmmaking talents by organizing pitching events and project meetings for the films selected to participate. It is part of the IFFAM, an annual film festival organized by the Macao Government Tourism Office and the Macao Films & Television Productions and Culture Association. The festival selects about 50 films per year from around the globe to showcase.

From left to right: Matthijs Wouter Knol of European Film Market, Alemberg Ang of VYAC Productions, FDCP Chairperson and CEO Liza Diño, IFFAM Festival Management Head Lorna Tee, Oggs Cruz, Bradley Liew of Epicmedia, Director Phyllis Grande, Bianca Balbuena-Liew of Epicmedia, Patti Lapus and Director Dodo Dayao

FDCP Chairperson and CEO Liza Diño was invited to attend this year’s IFFAM Project Market to meet with the project-makers and promote the newly launched FilmPhilippines location incentive. The FDCP sponsored initiative will provide financial incentives for international films that shoot in the Philippines starting next month, January 2020. 

Chair Liza noted the significance of FDCP participation in the IFFAM Project Market, “Proper project development,” she said, “is critical to make a well-made film that is globally competitive, and I'm really pleased that more and more Filipino filmmakers are seeing the importance of international project markets as a way to secure proper financing for their projects as well as valued partnerships. For filmmakers from a developing country like ours, access to production finance remains a challenge to independents filmmakers, so platforms like these allow them to find decision-makers who can see the potential of their film and invest in their vision.”

Embodying this very spirit of the IFFAM’s mission to engender international collaboration within the filmmaking industry, Irish director Lorcan Finnegan expressed his plans to shoot his upcoming film Nocebo in the Philippines. Finnegan, who received special mention in the IFFAM’s ‘Best Project’ competition for Nocebo, hopes to take up the FilmPhilippines location incentive for his upcoming project.

Cover photo from the IFFAM website