Yasmine follows the titular heroine and her dream to become a silat champion, the martial art popularized from the The Raid films. Newcomer Liyana Yus will play Yasmine, whose goal at martial arts is first to attract the attention of a boy, but soon grows into something bigger. Yasmine will be directed by Siti Kamaluddin, who produces along with her brother and cowrote the story. Kamaluddin and her brother Khairuddin Kamaluddin have a successful advertising company and have made the plunge into the film world. Jackie Chan collaborator Chan Man-Ching is directing the action sequences and helps with the 5 hour a day training regimen of Liyana Yus.
Siti Kamaluddin explains some of the difficulties of starting film production from scrap and importing talent and equipment:
“The equipment is rented from Malaysia, the crew is mixed: our sound and audio department is from Indonesia, then we’ve got Hong Kong and Chinese crew for technical,” she says, listing it all on her fingers. “The art department is from Malaysia but the head of production design is Australian. My DoP [director of photography] is Australian. Chan Man-Ching is from Hong Kong. We have talent from Indonesia and Malaysia. I’m Bruneian, my line producer is from Malaysia, and it’s been a challenge getting extras. Normally you’d go to talent for this stuff but that doesn’t exist here, so we have to do it all ourselves: advertising, calling schools, sending text messages.”
The film has completed filming and will be released at some point in 2014.
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