As Alex C. Lo explains it, the name of her development, production and finance house, Cinema Inutile (literally, “useless cinema”), is inspired by the Daoist idea of making space in one’s heart for wisdom. “A glass full to the brim with water has no room left to add anything,” she tells TFV.
Alex is sitting in the Excelsior Hotel beach restaurant with her PR team when we meet on the Venice Lido. Judging by the number of empty water bottles on the table, they have been filling them with ideas for some time in the 90-degree heat. Alex is in Venice with two of her newest features. One is Happyend, which has already screened in the Orizzonti section. Director Neo Sora’s fiction debut tells the story of students living in a near-future Japan, who take a stand against the country’s surveillance culture. After Venice, it will appear in Toronto’s Centerpiece section and the New York Film Festival’s Main Slate. Magnify is releasing world-wide and in the U.S.
Alex’s other Venice film is Stranger Eyes, which is about to play in the festival’s main competition; it also has its roots in Asian surveillance society. This kidnap thriller is the third feature directed by Yeo Siew Hua, whose A Land Imagined won the Golden Leopard at Locarno; Stranger Eyes is the first-ever Singaporean film to compete for the Golden Lion. It will continue its showcase exposure at the New York and BFI London film festivals.
These are prestigious venues, but the young Taiwan-born producer, who these days is more often found in Tokyo or New York, where she earned her M.A. in Cinema Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, is no stranger to red carpets. She has walked many of them since the company opened in 2021, from Cannes and Berlin to Sundance, Toronto and Busan.
When asked what attracts her to a new project, Lo points to originality, working with women, and her focus on artist-driven films with under-represented perspectives, like that of LGBTQ. Most of the films she has worked on since Cinema Inutile began producing have been international co-productions between Asia, Europe, Latin America and the U.S.
Things seem to be coming together nicely for the company: Alex had three films in this year’s Cannes festival – Viet and Nam, Being Maria and An Unfinished Film.
Other recent producing credits include Some Rain Must Fall (2024), which premiered in the Encounters competition at Berlinale and won the Special Jury Award. Girls Will Be Girls (2024) bowed at the Sundance Film Festival and won the Audience Award and Special Jury Award for Acting. The Settlers (2023) was first seen in Un Certain Regard at Cannes and was selected as Chile’s submission to the Academy Awards, and Club Zero (2023) starring Mia Wasikowska premiered in competition at Cannes.
