EXCLUSIVE: Producers Andrew Bendel and Alistair Maclean-Clark of Blue Horizon Productions have optioned the memoir Sea Dragons, Yvonne Foley’s story of how she believed she had been abandoned in Liverpool by her Chinese father as a child only to find out many years later that he and other sailors had been deported.
Foley only discovered later in life that her natural father, who was a sailor from Shanghai, had been blacklisted for demanding equality of treatment with British sailors and was prevented from coming back to the UK.
The story was first told in BBC online magazine article Looking for my Shanghai Father, and an exhibition about the Chinese sailors, Dragons of the Pool, was organized by Yvonne and Charles Foley and held in a Liverpool gallery.
Liverpool-based playwright and emerging screenwriter Lizzie Nunnery is penning the screenplay. Her works have been shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and she won Best New Play in the UK Theatre Awards for Narvik in 2017.
The pic is a co-production with Taiwan is Ma Studios (Amy Ma) and Firefly Films in New Zealand (Emma Slade and Victoria Dabbs). Development has been supported by the BFI Film Fund and it also participated in the Sino/European workshop Bridging the Dragon in Beijing. Late stage development finance was subsequently raised from Taiwanese industrial firm, Kingston Technology, and the New Zealand Film Commission.
The project, titled With Love, is now out to lead cast with a view to a market launch in Cannes.
