Azmi leads judging panel for Asia Pacific Screen Awards

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Sun, 10/28/2007 4:34 PM  |  Life

Cynthia Webb, Contributor, Gold Coast, Australia

The inaugural Asia Pacific Screen Awards ceremony will be held Nov. 13 at Gold Coast, Australia, and Indonesia's leading filmmaker Garin Nugroho is making plans to attend.

His film, Opera Jawa, is one of five films up for the Best Feature Film Award.

Another film from Indonesia, Denias Singing on a Cloud by John DeRantau, was nominated in the category Best Children's Feature Film.

The jury has been announced and the president, Shabana Azmi, a highly respected actress from India, will be joined by four other film world luminaries in judging the winners.

Azmi has acted in more than 140 films. She has won Indian and international awards and is the only Asian actor ever to have a retrospective of her films at the New York Film Festival (2002).

Various other honors have been bestowed upon her. She's also a noted activist for public health and women's rights, and has fought long and hard against religious fundamentalism.

In 1997 Azmi was nominated as a member of the Upper House of the Indian parliament.

Kim Dong-ho will be on the jury. He is the founder of Korea's renowned Pusan International Film Festival and vice chairman of Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC).

He too has received international honors and has served on the juries of many international film festivals. He has held government cultural positions and co-wrote History of Korean Cinema Policy, published in 2005.

Filmmaker Jafar Panahi from Iran, another jury member, directed The White Balloon in 1995, which won three awards including the Camera d'Or at Cannes.

His second film, The Mirror (1997), was also seen internationally, followed by The Circle (2000), which concerns the condition of women in Iran. The Circle is still banned in Iran, though it has been seen around the world and won 18 awards.

He followed that with Crimson Gold, shown at Cannes in 2003 but still not granted permission to be screened in Iran, then Offside which won the Silver Bear (Grand Jury Prize) at the Berlin Film Festival in 2006.

From England comes Nik Powell, a multiaward winning producer. He is now the director of the National Film and Television School in Britain. He set up Virgin Records with Richard Branson in the '70s and went into a partnership with Stephen Woolley to form Palace Video and Palace Pictures, then Palace Productions, specializing in quality cinema.

Powell has been executive producer on some first-class films, including Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves, The Crying Game and Mona-Lisa, and Michael Caton-Jones' Scandal, to name but a few. He holds quite a few positions as vice chairman, director and member of a long list of film organizations.

Chinese film director Tian Zhuangzhuang is the final member of the jury at APSA.

He's had a colorful career, in and out of trouble with the Chinese authorities for his political activities and protestations. His film The Blue Kite won the Grand Prix at the Tokyo International Film Festival in 1992.

He is the son of well-known film actors and was born in Beijing. He was a young member of the Red Guard for a short time in his teens but they found him too rebellious a thinker and sent him away for ""re-education"" in the provinces.

He escaped that by joining the army, where he was a trainee cinematographer on documentaries. This was more to his interest, and in 1978 he was admitted to the Beijing Film Academy to study directing.

In 2002 his film Spring Time in a Small Town won the San Marco Prize at the Venice Film Festival. His latest film, the elegantly made The Go Master, was recently screened at the Brisbane Film Festival.

Phillip Cheah, director of the long running Singapore Film Festival, was in Brisbane a few weeks ago as a member of the Nominations Council, assisting in the viewing of around 100 films submitted from 30 countries.

He said: ""I guess it's time to recognize this region because so many important trends in cinema are coming from this part of the world. After this first awards presentation, I think we will see a deluge of entries in the following years.""

""This year, entries have included the big-ticket films, like Curse of the Golden Flower by Zhang Yimou and The Sun Also Rises by Jiang Wen, but you also see a lot of the small voices, like films from Afghanistan or Azerbaijan, so it's very varied.""

""The reason why Asian cinema has been so interesting is because Asian societies are facing so many changes. People's lives are being really disturbed and a lot of stories come out of that. There has been a lot of upheaval in China, with rapid urbanization.""

""In my personal opinion, I think the next step will be seen in the Arab world. Many formerly non-producing Arab countries are making their first films and there are already some new Arab film festivals.""

The Queensland government has initiated what must surely become one of the world's major events in the world of cinema. This is made obvious by the interest of leading filmmakers such as China's Zhang Yimou and by the top level cinematic pedigree of the jury members.

They have made southeast Queensland a regional cultural hub, with the Asia Pacific Triennial Exhibition of Contemporary Art and now with the Asia Pacific Screen Awards.

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