HAF, the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum, has released their list of projects for 2008 and it's an impressive line-up full of big deal directors and producers like Hideo Nakata, Park Chan-Wook, Sabu, Ning Hao, Bong Joon-Ho, Nonzee Nimibutr and Fruit Chan (producing). The 25 projects are all at different stages of financing and they're all looking for funds so they can move into production. They'll be shopped around at this year's Hong Kong Filmart. Here's my take on the projects that look the most promising and, full disclosure, I was one of the folks hired to work on assembling the HAF project book so I feel unusually close to it this year.

The projects that I most want to see reach the screen:

7 DREAMS - Ning Hao (CRAZY STONE) wants to make a flick that does for time travel what SAVE THE GREEN PLANET did for UFOs. A ridiculous comedy about a young loser contacted by the future survivors of a nuclear apocalypse who are now hiding on the moon and who task him with the job of preventing armageddon. Oh, and they also want him to keep their colleague from turning into an old maid. Smart absurdism that needs his nimble touch.

DETOUR - I wasn't a huge fan of Alexi Tan's BLOOD BROTHERS but I really, really want to see this. Tan directs (and Terence Chang produces) a taut action flick about a rundown hitman who gets caught in a massive traffic jam in Macau on his way to wipe out a paranoid loanshark. He looks at the car next to him and his target's in the back seat. He decides to rub him out on the spot. Complications ensue. The whole movie seems to be a running shootout taking place in this massive traffic jam and all I can think of is the heist scene from HEAT, pumped up with Hong Kong kineticism. Call me fanboy, but I want to see it.

FUGITIVE CLUB - a knotty suspense film about four kids who fake a murder and then call the police as an elaborate prank. Things go hideously wrong and with editor/producer Daniel Yu (producer and editor of CRAZY STONE) on board and Zhang Yimou's screenwriter, Tang Xiru, making her feature film directorial debut I've got high hopes that this will be a good genre flick from China, rather than an elaborate art film.

MOTHER - Bong Joon-Ho (THE HOST) has a "why didn't I think of that?" premise: a young, asocial loser is made the scapegoat of a horrific murder and his hard-headed mother has to figure out who really did it to keep her son from being railroaded into prison. It seems to be a rural gothic, like Bong's MEMORIES OF MURDER, but with a stubborn mom in the lead role. I'm a sucker for this kind of flick.

ROMANCE RENTAL - the pitch is AMELIE meets Taiwanese social upheaval in the 1980's as a young girl whose views of the world are entirely formed by romance novels goes off to university in Taipei and gets caught up in Taiwan's sexual and political revolutions. It sounds to me like a politicized version of MEMORIES OF MATSUKO.

The craziest project of the bunch, and I mean it's so off-the-wall that I don't know how it's going to turn out, but I sure as hell want to see it, is SECRET OF THE BUTTERFLY from Thailand's Nonzee Nimibutr. The director of NANG NAK and OKAY BAYTONG starts his flick as a horror movie about a woman who kills her lovers and ends it with a lesson in evolutionary biology and the complete eradication of all men on earth, as women discover how to give birth asexually. Imaging Kiyoshi Kurosawa's PULSE except with ooky biology and gore at its heart instead of bloodless ghosts and you have an idea of what he's trying to accomplish here.

The big names in this line-up are associated with a variety of projects and here's the basic rundown:

Fruit Chan is producing WHITE NIGHTS, a Chinese flick about a love triangle set in a city-sized coal mine.

Wong Kar-wai's Jettone Productions is producing (via his longtime producer Jacky Pang) a hitman flick called BLOODLINE directed by Brit Richard Jobson and by Nicolas Roeg's son, Luc Roeg.

Pang Ho-cheung is directing THE BUS which is a meta-movie about a true life incident where a man raped three women on a long distance passenger bus trip and no one stopped him or helped the women. His take on the project: he's filtering the incident through a director making a semi-improvised movie about the assaults.

Sabu is directing DANCING MARY, a Hong Kong-set film about a bureaucrat trying to cleanse a city property of an evil spirit. Half the movie seems to take place in the afterlife and I really want to see Sabu's take on the land of the dead.

Hideo Nakata of THE RING is directing GENSENKAN, a bittersweet comedy about an American woman trying to turn a Japanese inn into a hip hotel and the characters who are hiding out at the inn who all cross each others' paths. Also, he's got a book in the works called A FOREIGN FILMMAKER'S GUIDE TO HOLLYWOOD about his work and his struggles in Los Angeles, and I'm dying to read it.

Li Yang of BLIND SHAFT is directing MANG LIU about kids coming to the city to find the parents who abandoned them when they moved away for better jobs. Things don't work out well for them, needless to say.

Kentaro Otani, director of NANA, is making TSUTENKAKU about two people who have given up on life who awaken to reality when they prevent the suicide of a transvestite. It sounds strange, but Otani demonstrated with NANA that he can make the thinnest sounding concept feel like a massive epic.

Park Chan-Wook has apparently attached Song Kang-Ho to play the priest-turned-vampire of his untitled vampire movie which sounds way better than I thought it would be.

Im Sang-Soo is directing a Paris-set film about a Korean immigrant whose cynical, sexually-hyperactive existence is challenged by a series of terrorist bombings.

It's an amazing line-up and there are far more movies in the HAF project book than I have time to write about here.

(Download the HAF project book)

(Official HAF site)