Alaric Tay

Source: VeryTay

Alaric Tay

One of the biggest budget projects at India’s Waves Film Bazaar project market this week is Gloria, a dark comedy that is already structured as a Singapore-Philippines co-venture.

“Way before Covid, my team were kicking around a list of ideas”, says Singaporean director Alaric Tay, who has some two decades as a performer and has been attached to more than 100 films and theatre works.

“Of the 13 different ideas, this one stood out for me because it was originally a story of a foreign domestic helper who comes to Singapore and finds out that her new employer is someone that she had had relationship with when she was back home.

“We tried to develop it into something that was more palatable for the cinema, for it to be a movie, and wanted to set it in a place where all the characters are stuck with each other and cannot run away. We thought a cruise ship might work.”

With the production team of Blackops Studios Asia from the Philippines and VeryTay and DB Media, both from Singapore, expecting to give the project at least one further re-write, the story has already evolved.

“In the current version, Gloria is a young, naive entrepreneur wannabe who wants to start a little business back in the Philippines,” Tay explains. “She meets an investor who is also rather charming and falls in love. But next thing you know, this guy disappears and she loses everything.

“Because of this, she has to find a job to get herself back on her feet again. She gets a gig as a live-in butler on a luxury cruise and the guest she’s supposed to take care of on the ship is the Singaporean investor and his wife.”

The project had its first public outing last year at the project sidebar of Singapore’s ATF market, where it won the top prize.

“I think going to ATF and winning the prize validated our vision of the film,” says Tay. “It also gave us a little more confidence to go out and imagine a budget that was higher than what we originally planned.”

The stated budget now is $2.75m and Gloria arrives at Waves Film Bazaar with around $500,000 in place. Producer Derek Judge will be in attendance, seeking financing and a partner that can take on a co-producer and financier role.

BlackOps is known for a more genre-oriented slate but is looking to diversify into different registers and saw a comedy-drama with broad appeal across Asia as coming together quicker than some of its horror or action projects.

Tay adds: “Originally, Gloria was going to just be very local but having seen the reactions, such as those from ATF last year and from BlackOps, we began to understand that the themes are universal. So, let’s not waste it.”

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