A family torn apart by the unsolved murder of their young daughter tries to keep living day to day in “One Fine Day,” a Malaysian drama from director Tan Seng Kiat with Asian film icon Sylvia Chang aboard as executive producer.
The project is part of the Asian Project Market, which runs within the Busan International Film Festival’s Asian Contents & Film Market (ACFM).
After their nine-year-old girl is sexually assaulted and killed, a family of four becomes three. With the case still open, the father fixates on tracking down the killer, the mother seeks solace in religion and their teenage son is weighed down by an untruth he has kept to himself. As life carries on around them, each grieves in their own way, and their sorrow pulls them apart even as they cling to what is left of the family. The filmmakers bill it as a film less about cracking a murder than about the ordinary days that come after a devastating loss.
Tan drew on a real child murder in Malaysia. What lingered for him was not only the crime but the family it left behind. Public attention tends to fix on the culprit, the investigation and whether justice is done, he says, while the family still has to get up, eat and go to work in a world that carries on as if nothing has changed. “I wanted to explore how people live through something unbearable, while still having to face the ordinary routines of everyday life,” Tan says.
He does not want the film to offer neat answers about grief. “Even within the same family, people can experience the same loss but cope with it in very different ways. They may love each other deeply, yet struggle to understand one another,” he says. Tan plans to trace those shifts through small moments, such as a family dinner, a conversation, a silence or the absence of something once there. “Above all, I hope audiences will see these characters not just as victims of tragedy, but as ordinary people trying to find a way to live with something they cannot change.”
The script is in development after several years of work on the story, and the team is working with Malaysian and Taiwanese partners to push toward production while looking for more financing and international partners. Chang and producer Elyce Chin say Tan has wanted to make the film for over five years. They were moved by his sensitive handling of the material and his focus on the family’s everyday life, calling it a story “both deeply personal and universal.” Lim Shu Jia and E.N. Lee are also producers.
In Busan, the team is looking for co-producers, financing and pre-sales, and hopes to test how a Malaysian story can connect with audiences from other cultures.
Tan is also developing “The Supermum and Three Stickmen,” a comedy drawn from real events in which a single mom, saving up for her son’s wedding, is robbed of her nest egg and tries to win the stolen cash back. After so long immersed in grief, he says, he wants to look at relationships through humor and absurdity, though both films share his interest in how ordinary people react when life takes a sudden turn.