Le partenaire historique SEAFIC lancé en 2016 par Raymond Panathavirangoon en Thaïlande ferme ses portes à l’issue de la dernière session de cet avril 2022. Une bien mauvaise nouvelle pour les jeunes professionnels d’Asie du Sud-Est.
L’annonce récente officielle de SEAFIC (qui suit) est l’occasion du témoignage pour PAS d’un partenariat fructueux et dynamique.
Mot de Guillaume Mainguet, coordinateur des ateliers, sur les réseaux sociaux au moment de l’annonce de la clôture du projet.
« It’s been a joy to collaborate with SEAFIC since 2016. We’ve achieved a special, dynamic and creative accompanying to support young wonderful filmmakers and producers from SEA. A solid enough reason to be proud of the high standards expertise offered and the uniqueness of the warm work atmosphere provided. Seafic Lab will be missed a lot to the region. Sincere and deep acknowledgement to Raymond, Dew, Penwadee, Franz, Sasikarn.
An opportunity here to highlight also the faithfull and constant support of French embassies network to PAS and its partners. to Pierre Jalladeau, Jeremy Segay and all their predecessors Charlotte Deflassieux, Loïc Wong, Frédéric Alliod, Guillaume Duchemin.
It has been an open secret for a while, but today we officially announce that SEAFIC will be closing after concluding our final lab session, the SEAFIC Seed Lab, from April 3-9, 2022. After April 15th, 2022, SEAFIC will proceed to shut down our non-profit foundation and will no longer be in operation.
Alas, the loss of funders, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic which made finding new support even harder than it normally would be, was the main deciding factor for this. The difficulty of holding in-person events and rising costs of travel is another compounding reason – we at SEAFIC fully believe in meeting in-person for our lab to succeed. We have been asked to consider keeping SEAFIC going as an entity, and to wait for possibilities of new funders in the future, especially after the pandemic. But alas, this just would not be possible, with taxes and expenses still needing to be paid just to keep the foundation going. More importantly, we could not keep our staff waiting around without income – that would be incredibly unfair. As such, it was decided late last year to let our staff look for new jobs, since we could no longer guarantee if or when SEAFIC can restart. And without our staff, it was just a quick logical hop that SEAFIC could not continue.
On a brighter note, we are super happy that we are able to do one final lab with Seed Lab, and to conclude with an in-person event. We are very proud of all the work we have done for Southeast Asian cinema in the past 6 years, and we believe that the 20 projects and 5 Seed Lab filmmakers that have been at our lab throughout the years will be a testament to our efforts. With five SEAFIC projects already shot or in production right now, and five more slated to shoot in 2022, we are incredibly excited to see all of our alumni’s films realized. In addition, our partner at Produire au Sud still plans to continue their workshop in Southeast Asia – we are very thankful for our collaboration since the very beginning.
Thank you to everyone who has supported us throughout the years and believed in what we were doing, from our funders and partners, our staff and board members, all the SEAFIC filmmakers, mentors and jury, and all the organizations and individuals we worked with in Southeast Asia and beyond. And thank you to anyone who came to our talks, be they online, at SEAFIC Open Fair, or at various presentations we did throughout SE Asia and at film festivals and events around the world.
For those wondering, SEAFIC Facebook will also stop our near-daily sharing of general Southeast Asian film news starting from April 15th. However, we will still share news about our SEAFIC projects and Seed Lab filmmakers going forward, though the posts will be much more sporadic going forward.
Our gratitude once again to everyone for following SEAFIC these past few years. We believe that Southeast Asian cinema is growing in stature internationally, and we hope that our hard work has contributed to that growth in some way. In the meantime, please look forward to our photos from our final lab in Phuket .
Thank you all!
« Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.” – Robert Bresson
