ELEANOR welcome Will&Sej

ELEANOR welcomes Will&Sej, a Sydney-based director duo whose work bends genre with uncommon precision, turning familiar cinematic languages into strange, funny, and unmistakably authored commercial storytelling.

Will Suen and Sejon Im understand genre as a system of rules. In their hands, those rules are not simply referenced. They are studied, stretched, corrupted, and rebuilt until the audience is watching something that feels both instantly recognizable and completely singular. 

Genre gives Will&Sej the rules, so they can bend them beautifully.

That is what gives their work its charge. In Sweet Juices, their award-winning short film, Chinese food becomes power, currency, evidence, intimacy, and myth. Dumplings do not simply appear as a cultural detail. They reorganise the world. Sauce becomes a clue. Appetite becomes motive. A story about two genius cooks facing eviction and incarceration unfolds through crime, romance, magical realism, food obsession, and heist momentum until the absurd premise begins to feel completely inevitable.

The films may be grotesque, tactile, surreal, or wildly funny, but they never feel random. There is structure beneath the mess. A logic beneath the escalation. A cinematic intelligence guiding every disgusting reveal, awkward pause, strange prop, and visual punchline. 

That control is what separates their work from simple absurdity. Their films can be gross or unhinged, but they are never loose. Every escalation has timing. Every visual gag has construction. Every product becomes part of the world’s internal logic. 

For Slather’s The Sun Is Not Your Friend, Will&Sej turned sunscreen advertising into a grotesque survival comedy, recasting the sun as an overbearing, deeply unsettling antagonist. What could have been a familiar SPF message became a body-horror fable about skin, vanity, protection, fear, and the suspicious violence of daylight. Sunscreen became survival gear. Daylight became a menace. A health message became comedy with bite. 

That is where genre becomes more than influence. For Will&Sej, it becomes a permission structure. Once the audience recognises the rules of the world, they understand how that world is supposed to behave. That recognition gives the duo room to corrupt it, escalate it, and push it somewhere stranger without losing the viewer. The chaos works because the frame holds. The joke lands because the architecture is there.

“For us, comedy starts with comprehension,” say Will&Sej. “If someone doesn’t understand what’s happening, they can’t laugh. So we always come back to story and character first. Once people understand the world and the setup is doing its job, then you can push the gag further, make the idea stranger, and let the chaos start to build.”

Their commercial work carries that philosophy across brands and categories. For Maxibon’s Get Em’ While They’re Cold, bakery-inspired ice cream becomes the basis for a frozen bakery world, complete with absurd product logic and a premise that feels ridiculous only until the film makes it feel obvious. For eBay, sneakers become obsession. For MasterFoods, sauce becomes behavior. Across work for brands including eBay, Sony, ASICS, Smirnoff, Slather, Maxibon, and MasterFoods, the duo has built a reputation for visually bold, thumb-stopping films that let products cause trouble inside the story rather than sit politely inside the frame. 

Their origin story has the exact comic friction of their films. They met through Facebook Marketplace, where Will asked for a discount and Im refused to budge. It is a small detail, but a revealing one. The push, the resistance, the refusal to make things too easy. Somehow, the failed negotiation became the beginning of a creative partnership built on escalation. 

Before the partnership had a name, each director arrived with a different kind of voltage. 

Suen, the son of rural Chinese restaurant owners, grew up on Cantonese films watched on VHS, absorbing cinema as something physical, excessive, emotional, and deeply tied to appetite. His instincts run toward the visceral edge of an idea. He is often the one willing to push a scene past its safest shape, not to lose control, but to discover what it can really hold.

Im brings a different current. A Korean-Australian director based in Sydney, he went from making trap beats in his bedroom to shooting rap videos, giving his work a sense of rhythm learned before the camera ever entered the room. Where Will’s instincts are often drawn to images that can provoke disgust, warmth, love, or some stranger feeling that refuses to land cleanly, Im brings the architecture around the impulse: rhythm, texture, and the grounded voltage that lets the feeling push further without losing the world around it.