Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise made one night of walking and talking into a format filmmakers keep coming back to, and Wong Kar-wai showed how a city can carry a love story. Ephemera, the feature debut of writer-director Shan Jiang, puts both ideas in post-pandemic Shanghai and makes its couple two young women. The film is a small, carefully rehearsed indie, and it now has a Hong Kong sales company working to take it beyond the festival circuit.

As Variety first reported, Cappu Films has taken on worldwide sales for the queer romance, which had its world premiere in Tribeca’s U.S. Narrative Competition. Cappu is shopping the film at the Asian Contents & Film Market, which runs alongside the Busan International Film Festival. Yvonne Shuyu Zhang plays Asher, a young woman about to return to Los Angeles who invites her hip-hop dance teacher, Tori (Shu-Yi), out for coffee. According to Tribeca’s synopsis, the coffee becomes a night of wandering the former French Concession, and by dawn the two women realize their connection came one night too late.

The comparisons are deliberate. Tribeca programmer Jarod Neece’s note placed the film in the line of Linklater’s Before trilogy and Wong’s city-bound romances. Jiang, who developed the project soon after finishing film school at Columbia, told Purple Hour: “From day one, I described it to everyone as a Chinese lesbian version of Before Sunrise.” They added that they studied Linklater’s screenplay “religiously” while writing. The first money came from Jiang’s high school best friends and cousins, with other investors joining later, and the production had three weeks of rehearsal and two weeks of shooting.

The credits reflect that scale. The film is a U.S.-Singapore co-production in English and Mandarin with an 82-minute running time. Jiang produced it with Yinx Zhou and Sol Ye. Jane Zheng and Alex Steyermark are executive producers, Ashley Jiang has a story credit and Feixue Tang shot the film.

For Cappu, Ephemera is the most intimate title on a busy market slate. Filmmaker Janice Woo founded the company in Hong Kong in 2018, and it also has offices in Los Angeles and Beijing. Its Busan titles include Francesco Lucente’s fantasy adventure Starbright, starring John Rhys-Davies and Diego Boneta, which Cappu boarded on the eve of the market, and Joy Hopwood’s Australian dramedy Her Last Laugh. Its wider slate includes Fox Hunt, toplined by Tony Leung Chiu-wai, and Erica Xia-Hou’s Slamdance title Banr.

Ephemera premiered at Tribeca on June 7 and screened at Oslo/Fusion International Film Festival in September. In Busan, Cappu is now presenting it to buyers rather than festival audiences.

Jiang has said the film closes with Asher and Tori imagining their goodbyes through other films, Before Sunrise and Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution among them. Now Cappu has to persuade buyers that a debut paid for by school friends and cousins, and shot in two weeks, deserves a run of its own.

Tags: festival-deal, Busan International Film Festival, Cappu Films, Ephemera, Shan Jiang, Tribeca Festival