Purin Film Fund Awards $160K to Six Southeast Asian Projects
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- Purin Film Fund will distribute $160,000 across six independent Southeast Asian film projects in its Spring 2026 round, with co-director Aditya Assarat noting the session broke the fund's record for submission numbers.
- Fiction production grants of $30,000 each went to Vietnam's "Dear Son An" — about a nine-year-old boy navigating his single mother's cancer — and Cambodia's "Little Phnom Penh", which traces a woman's longing for home from post-Khmer Rouge Phnom Penh to early-2000s California.
- Documentary production grants of $15,000 each went to "Sisters in War" (Myanmar-Australia), following two sisters who leave family life to fight the country's military junta, and the Philippines' "Once, Here" (working title), about a fisher couple holding on after foreign vessels take over their waters.
- Documentary post-production grants of $35,000 each went to Malaysia's "Araro Ariraro", which uses Tamil folk songs from colonial Malayan plantations to reimagine ancestors, and the Philippines' "The People Outside", which follows a filmmaker into Pacific-side mountain ranges to trace a long-running conflict.
- Assarat warned that while submission numbers keep climbing, the number of funding organizations in the region "remains the same," making the funding environment "increasingly competitive" for independent projects.
- Founded in 2017 under the Purin Foundation and managed by filmmakers Anocha Suwichakornpong and Assarat, the fund covers independent cinema across production, exhibition, and education; applications for the Fall 2026 session open Aug. 1.
Why it matters: For independent filmmakers across five Southeast Asian countries, the Purin Fund is one of the few regional pipelines backing politically and historically sensitive work — from junta resistance to plantation-era memory — at a moment when, as co-director Aditya Assarat flagged, submissions are at record highs while the number of funders in the region has not grown, tightening the squeeze on which stories reach the screen.
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