Eleanor, the production company headed by president Sophie Gold, has added Will&Sej–the Sydney-based director duo consisting of Will Suen and Sejon Im–for commercials and branded content. This marks Will&Sej’s first career commercial representation in the U.S. and U.K. markets.
Will&Sej’s work bends genre with uncommon precision, turning familiar cinematic languages into strange, funny, and unmistakably authored commercial storytelling. Will&Sej 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.
A genre-bending example is Sweet Juices, a short film which won Best Picture in Fantastic Shorts at Fantastic Fest, picked up a Special Mention at Fantasia, and earned a 2024 Australian Directors’ Guild (ADG) nomination for Best Direction of a Short. In Sweet Juices, Chinese food becomes power, currency, evidence, intimacy, and myth. Dumplings do not simply appear as a cultural detail. They reorganize 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 of Will&Sej 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”–which won Silver in Film at the 2025 Clio Health Awards–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 recognizes 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. The Slather work was done for the Australian market via Haven’t You Done Well, the production house which represents the directing duo in the Asian-Pacific (APAC) region.
“For us, comedy starts with comprehension,” shared Will&Sej in a joint statement. “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 another Aussie market spot produced by Haven’t You Done Well, 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.
The directorial duo’s origin story has the exact comic friction of their films. Will and Sej met through Facebook Marketplace, where Will asked for a discount and Sej 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. Will, 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.
Sejon 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, Sejon brings the architecture around the impulse: rhythm, texture, and the grounded voltage that lets the feeling push further without losing the world around it.
Together, their process is not about smoothing each other out. It is about sharpening the collision. The work carries that charge: handmade detail, practical absurdity, genre intelligence, and an instinctive understanding of how audiences move through images now. Every strange object has a job. Every escalation has pressure behind it. Every gag feels like it was built by two directors daring each other to make the scene more unforgettable.
“Will&Sej have this brilliant ability to make chaos feel inevitable,” said Eleanor’s Gold. “Their work may look gloriously unhinged at first glance, but underneath is a very rigorous emotional engineering. That is rare. The work feels outrageous because it should, but it lands because they are incredibly precise about what the audience needs to understand, when they need to understand it, and how far the idea can be pushed before it breaks.”
“Eleanor felt different straight away,” said Will&Sej jointly. “We were looking for someone who did not just respect fresh ideas, but actually needed them. Someone who would not water out the spark. Sophie had such a strong vision for where we could sit creatively and in the industry. She saw the chaos in our work as something harnessed, not something that needed to be made safer.”
