Carrie Ng and Shirley Yung make their directorial debuts with Angel Whispers

The 12th Hong Kong Asia Film Financing Forum (HAF) announced their list of films they are funding, and the list is full of potentially cool projects. But the project that stands out is Angel Whispers, which will be the directorial debuts of Carrie Ng Ka-Lai (吳家麗) and Shirley Yung Sau-lan (翁秀蘭). Of the 25 project winners, 5 of them have female directors or co-directors. There is also Lina Yang for Forgive Me, Dechen Roder for The Honeygiver Among the Dogs (Bhutan), Fazila Amiri for Hip Hop Kabul (a documentary), Birgitte Sigmundstad (with Sherman Ong) for Lucy and I (a documentary)

Carrie Ng is best known for starring in a string of genre pictures, including Naked Killer. Shirley Yung has spent much of her career being a production manager and planner on a lot of popular Hong Kong films. It will be interesting to see how both of them use their experience on Angel Whispers. The film is about a group of prostitutes who battle the Triad over ownership of a building slated to be demolished, and soon someone begins killing the women.

The amount of woman directors is painfully small (and awesome words on that subject were written recently by Lexi Alexander), so it’s good to see some of them breaking through in Asian cinema, even if there is a long way to go.

The HAF selects projects from all around Asia, with this year having winners from China, Japan, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, and Taiwan. A full list of winners is available on the HAF site and by pdf.

via FilmBizAsia