A taxi driver caught up in the past is haunted by his alter ego and commits a murder in hopes of protecting his home. Inspired by the likes of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), and Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express (1994).
Red Rain is a short film that has been in development over the last 2 years. It takes inspiration from classics of global cinema and uses a multicultural fusion of genres to engage in social commentary. Taking inspiration from John Woo's style of heroic bloodshed and re-interpreting it in a sci-fi thriller and surrealist narrative, Red Rain engages in a critical discussion regarding a city's identity through past, present, and future.
One interesting fact about Red Rain is that the crew is made up of individuals who graduated from the same international school from various year groups between 2014 and 2020. The extraordinary context brought about by COVID-19 has meant that people who are pursuing their education and careers in different corners of the world now have the rare opportunity of being in the same city at the same time. The diverse wealth of talent gathered at this unique time is too good an opportunity to pass up.
This is an ambitious project which will be shot on 35mm film. In this digital era, why 35mm? At its core, this film is about time and memory, and using the traditional time-honored format of film negative highlights the tenuous relationship between looking to the past and into the future. We want to capture the beautiful neon nightscape of an anonymous city with the rich texture of colour negative film. At the same time, we pay homage to the sense of nostalgia evoked by the disappearing medium.
We are incredibly excited about the prospect of delivering an aesthetically pleasing end product. To achieve this goal, we need to be realistic about the many costs associated with shooting on film. We need to order approximately 4,000ft of film stock from Kodak (obtained at subsidised rates through Kodak's Educational Allowance Programme), and will need sufficient funds to scan the film from celluloid to 4K digital.
All of your generous contributions will go towards rental expenses for professional industry standard film equipment (camera, lenses, lights, stabilisation, sound gear), hiring talented actors to portray our unique characters, rental costs for set pieces including a taxi, as well as transportation expenses for cast and crew to move between filming locations.
We hope to bring this project to life with your generous contributions. Depending on the level of your donation, you will receive a variety of exclusive rewards (kindly see the 'Perks' section at the top of this post if you are on your phone, or to the right if you are on your laptop!). We are thankful for your support, and are all very eager to share our story of a taxi driver navigating a Kubrickian, nightmarish world.
This project aims to engage socially relevant themes and ideas. We hope to present a compelling narrative and underscore the aesthetic beauty of the urban cityscape on 35mm film. Our crew are young filmmakers hungry for opportunities to work, experiment, and contribute to the rich cinematic history in Hong Kong. This is especially important in an era when the entire world is undergoing rapid changes in identity, infrastructure, and culture. We hope to share a story that resonates deeply within us all. Red Rain, simply put, is a story of longing for a place we can call home.
We hope you can be a part of our journey and kindly invite you to contribute!
The biggest risk of this project is the choice to shoot on 35mm as opposed to digital. However, we have a 16-person dedicated crew of talented filmmakers from strong filmmaking backgrounds - many of whom have studied at elite art schools such as NYU Tisch and are working full-time in the film industry. We are confident in our abilities to execute this vision and deliver a strong end product. This film will be submitted to a vast array of global film festival circuits, in hopes of being screened alongside other compelling films from all over the world.
As independent filmmakers, another one of our biggest challenges is sourcing funding outside of the traditional studio system. Because short films are not easily marketable and have limited revenue streams, many studios may not back the project given its limited financial Return-on-Investment potential. However, we strongly believe that this project is artistically and culturally significant as a portrait of time, memory, and change in a city as well as its people. We are reaching out to you all in hopes of helping us acquire the resources necessary to turn this project into a reality. It is our guarantee that every dollar you contribute will be used as impactfully and efficiently as possible. We are incredibly grateful for your generous support in helping make this project come to life!
If you aren't able to donate, we kindly ask you to share this campaign on your social media feeds. Please feel free to reach out to us for any inquiries or offers at redrain2044@gmail.com
We will begin production by end-June and will are aiming to finish post-production by mid-August.