I relish any opportunity to watch regional Indian cinema. My fellow jury members were Russian film critic/expert on the native cinema of Russian regions, Sergey Anashkin and Indian critic/Artistic Director of the 13th Bengaluru International Film Festival, Vidyashankar N. Jois. We had the pleasure of conversing via email over several weeks until ultimately unanimously deciding our winners
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Festival Reports
A lot of credit goes to the hard work of NETPAC members that helped introduce Asian/Pacific films to the Western world. I am so very appreciative and proud of NETPAC’s work and of having been a member since the beginning.
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We all thought that the outbreak of the virus would be short, but not everything went as we expected. Many festivals waited for a while to make the right decision. Should the festival be held socially-distanced in accordance with health protocols or is it safer to hold a virtual one? Who knows?
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The Jury selected from 10 films from eight countries with the top prize going to Reza Dormishian’s NO CHOICE (Iran) for a touching view on a part of society that is mainly disregarded and has become a universal problem.
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Whether judging from their production value or auteurist vision, the selected works demonstrated considerable creative ambitions that reflected the social and cultural landscapes of their origins, each exhibiting its own memorable highlights and surprising genius.
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Overall, this year’s NETPAC entries were of high quality, directed by veterans as well as newcomers. Their subjects were the ordinary men and women in ordinary jobs, adults having problems with their lives, and the one film of a foreigner trying to make it in the new country.
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Our choice was reduced to just two films: 200 Meters (a co-production between Palestine, Italy, Jordan, Sweden) by Ameen Nayfeh, a talented director, acclaimed for some of his previous works. It tells the story of an individual’s experience who suffers in the battered Palestinian land; and In Between Dying, the second fiction film by Azerbaijani writer and director Hilal Baydarov.
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AFFBCN was held both physically and online. Its on-site activity began on from Monday, 23 November after the Government of the Generalitat de Catalunya announced the reopening of cinemas with a 50% capacity in a first phase.
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No fewer than seven of the 14 films in the NETPAC Competition were world premieres, gathered from the different sections of the festival. Three of them were first films and also competed in the ‘First Features Competition’ where Wang Yiao’s film Great Happiness (China) deservedly won the Main Award.
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As the only mountain film festival in the country, UMFF aims at presenting important contemporary mountain films from all over the world. Also, it has tried to function as a platform to showcase the trends of current mountain culture.
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International Women's Day
We are pleased to bring to you, for the second year, our International Women’s Day screening!
Free online screening | 8th March
IWD theme this year is #ChooseToChallenge. A challenged world is an alert world. From challenge comes change, so let's all choose to challenge - Ubolsyn herself completely embraces the theme!
This year we invite you to a special free online screening of ULBOLSYN from director Adilkhan Yerzhanov. Our sincere thanks to the producers, Guillaume de Seille and Olga Khlasheva, for their generosity and their efforts in facilitating the screening.
The film tells the story of a girl named Ulbolsyn (Kazakh for ‘let there be a son’) whose little sister Azhar is kidnapped by the regional mayor’s brother Urgen for marital purposes and taken away to his village. Ulbolsyn wants her sister to be free and to enter her into a foreign university so that she can pursue a future career. As soon as she learns about the incident, Ulbolsyn decides to fight for her sister and face down the patriarchal world of the people living in the Karatas village.
The film is the recipient of the NETPAC Award in Tallinn Black Nights and TRT award in CineLink Sarajevo WIP 2020