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Cross-cultural love, food make for good ingredients in BananaMana’s debut feature film

SINGAPORE – It is a tale of two cultures colliding – of traditional Okinawan food and Chinese style cooked food – and of a Singaporean chef and a top Japanese food critic searching for each other after an emotional breakup as they search for answers in the beauty of both cultures.

SINGAPORE – It is a tale of two cultures colliding – of traditional Okinawan food and Chinese style cooked food – and of a Singaporean chef and a top Japanese food critic searching for each other after an emotional breakup as they search for answers in the beauty of both cultures.

BananaMana Films’ first feature film, Jimami Tofu, set to be released in February next year.

This romantic drama revolves around a Singaporean chef who finds himself in Okinawa, begging an old chef to teach him traditional Okinawan food, and a top Japanese food critic who travels to Singapore to discover Southeast Asian cuisine. The pair are looking for each other after their breakup years ago when she left him without a trace. The Singaporean chef meanwhile goes in search of the food critic in her hometown but instead discovers the art of traditional Okinawan cuisine.

BananaMana Films co-founder Jason Chan — best known for his role as the Green Samurai Ranger in the US series Power Rangers: Ninja Storm — plays the lead role as the Singaporean chef.

Japanese actress Mari Yamamoto plays the food critic with choreographer Rino Nakasone, famous for her work with K-Pop sensations such as SHINee and Girls’ Generation, playing her best friend and other party in the love triangle.

The film was announced yesterday (Dec 8) by BananaMana Films at the Asia Television Forum and Market 2016 as part of the Singapore Media Festival 2016. Jimami Tofu is among the line up of more than 50 film and television titles covering various genres of Asian stories presented by the Info-communications Media Development Authority (IMDA) for the coming year.

BananaMana Films, which specialises in creating Asian scripted dramas in English, is currently in talks with local cinema chains but has not confirmed a theatrical release date. “We are aiming to have the film ready for a premiere the end of February,” said co-founder Christian Lee, 49, who is also acting in Jimami Tofu.

Sharing his thoughts on the film, Lee believes one of the major draws will be the scenes of Okinawa culture, food and Japan’s rustic beauty. “We have elements such as underwater free diving, orange orchards, night time chrysanthemum fields, seaside farms, a hillside rustic home restaurant,” he said.

On how he and Chan came up with the idea behind this film, he said: “We have always wanted to do a love story revolving around food, set in Japan. We were confident that we could create a simple love story, such as our drama “Perfect Girl” (on Netflix), we just needed to figure out how to finance the high costs of filming in Japan.”

Then, coincidentally, an invitation arrived from the Okinawa Film Office for a fully paid scouting trip to explore all the filming locations in Okinawa.

“Once we tasted the Ryukyu Dynastic food and saw the rustic traditional side of Okinawa culture, our story idea was birthed,” said Chan. It provided the duo the perfect setting with which they could shape the love story around.

Also announced yesterday, BananaMana secured production funding and global distribution through pre-sales agreements with international distributors including Korean media giant IHQ, Japanese global TV platform VIKI and Encore Inflight.

Interest from international distributors in this film has been a confidence boost for the filmmaking duo. “The interest to distribute our content really boiled down to the content itself. If they didn’t think our content could make them money, they wouldn’t be willing to make a pre-sale on our debut feature,” said Lee.

On their partnership with IHQ,“We have always held the Korean media industry in very high regard. They have some of the best script writers and actors in the world. To us, it’s the confidence boost we need, to know that we can create our little stories all from tiny little Singapore, and distribute to the world,” Lee added.

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