first draft
2009The project began as Tomé, a documentary following São Toméan artist Alex-Keller Fonseca toward his first solo exhibition.
Wê / Unfinished film anthology / São Tomé and Príncipe
A documentary about artists became a world inside their paintings.
Wê was the biggest film project Kris Haamer attempted and did not finish. It began in 2009 as Tomé, following artists in São Tomé and Príncipe, then changed shape: paintings became portals, local writers imagined lives for their characters, and documentary, fiction, workshops, storyboards, casting, and software began to sit inside the same project.
Wê · eyes2009–14 · unfinished
young writers
6A July 2013 writing workshop invited six São Toméan writers to choose paintings and imagine lives for the people inside them.
anthology strands
4The surviving story plan includes Slingshot, Love For Day, Elsa Figueira / Domestic Violence, and Censorship / Blue.
people involved
36A contemporary Wê project post says 36 people worked across writing, production, research, camera, casting, and post-production roles.
The premise
What if a painting was not an image, but the beginning of a film?
The first Tomé treatment was much more linear: Alex-Keller travelled around São Tomé looking for mentors and advice before a solo gallery show. The thesis was entrepreneurship and artistic agency. Production took Kris from Lisbon to São Tomé in 2011, where the project accumulated artists, places, interviews, collaborators, and far more material than one conventional documentary could comfortably contain.
Wê became a different proposition. The project kept the real artists but allowed figures from their paintings to acquire histories, relationships, conflicts, and futures. The documentary could show how an artwork was made; fiction could ask what happened to the person inside it; a writers' room could challenge the director's assumptions; digital media could connect the fragments without forcing them into a single linear cut.
- 01Look at the artwork
Start with real São Toméan artists, paintings, places, and documentary observation.
- 02Enter the frame
Ask writers to imagine the painted character's life before and after the captured moment.
- 03Let the form follow
Turn the strongest stories into fiction, documentary, workshops, excerpts, or independent films.
01
Change the container
When the documentary became too narrow, enter the paintings instead.
Tomé started with a conventional documentary engine: follow Alex-Keller Fonseca and other artists, watch ambition meet the realities of a small island art scene, and build toward an exhibition. Wê changed the form. Instead of only filming artists talking about their work, the project asked what would happen if the camera crossed the surface of a painting and followed the person depicted inside it.
- The artist documentary remained the factual spine
- Painted characters created fictional doors into everyday São Toméan life
- The same subject could be seen through several incompatible points of view
02
Share authorship
Use a writers' room to turn paintings into local story prompts.
In July 2013, Kris Haamer and painter Dio Lima brought together Akaisa Borges, Marlucy Bandeira, Gilberto Ceita, Luisa Santos, Wilme Dias, and Edneyse Coelho. Each writer selected work from São Toméan artists and imagined what might have happened before and after the painted moment. The method made the storyworld larger than one director's reading of the islands.
- Paintings were treated as evidence and prompts, not illustrations for a finished script
- Writers met artists and developed stories from specific works
- The workshop turned authorship into a visible part of production
03
Prototype the film
Treat scenes, excerpts, workshops, and side projects as experiments before pretending the feature was finished.
Wê accumulated storyboards, casting experiments, short films, field shoots, workshops, app ideas, and a public pitch around a feature-length ambition. The useful lesson is not that the feature failed. It is that the project already behaved like a creative production system: test a story in one form, watch what becomes real, then let the strongest branch continue independently.
- Wê excerpts survive as evidence of filmed anthology material
- Elsa Figueira eventually escaped the parent project and became its own campaign
- The unfinished status is kept visible instead of retroactively presenting an 82-minute release
What remains
The feature stayed unfinished. The method did not disappear.
A Vimeo excerpt survives with material from Elsa Figueira and Me & My Friend The Slingshot. Contemporary project writing preserves the six-writer workshop and four anthology strands. The old tomefilm.com site preserves the earlier Tomé treatment, production plan, budget, character profiles, and team structure.
Most importantly, Elsa Figueira later became an independent social-impact film and campaign. Wê therefore works best in the HAAM archive not as a failed 82-minute film, but as an unfinished parent system that generated real stories, collaborations, and later work.
Project record
Keep the ambition and the unfinished status in the same frame.
Period pages used several descriptions and intended runtimes as the project evolved. This case study treats those as development records, not proof of a completed feature. The surviving evidence supports a partially produced film/storyworld with a substantial collaborative production process.
- Project
- Wê / originally Tomé
- Form
- Unfinished documentary-fiction anthology and transmedia storyworld
- Location
- São Tomé and Príncipe
- Period
- First draft November 2009; active development through 2014
- Original treatment
- Kris Haamer
- Central artist / collaborator
- Alex-Keller Fonseca
- Writing workshop
- Kris Haamer, Dio Lima, Akaisa Borges, Marlucy Bandeira, Gilberto Ceita, Luisa Santos, Wilme Dias, Edneyse Coelho
- Field production
- Kris Haamer, Wannes Debusschere, Leonardo Umbelina, with a wider São Toméan and international production network
- Status
- Partially produced and unfinished; surviving excerpts and descendant projects remain public
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