Desmar, the Singapore, Los Angeles and London-based producer and financier, is quietly becoming a valuable funding source for international filmmakers, supporting a crop of anticipated projects at the EFM. They include Cornerstone’s untitled Mike Leigh project, Hanway’s Good Boy, Protagonist’s H Is For Hawk, Best Friend Forever’s Sundance prize winner The Things You Kill and Gaga Corporation’s A Pale View Of Hills.

Led by Los Angeles-based Naomi Despres and Canada-born, Singapore-based Michèle Marshall, Desmar backs projects with “a strong point of view, and an element of creative risk – the project must have an ambition to...