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Chicago – Fall film festivals begin this week with Season 17 of the Asian Pop-Up Cinema, curated by Executive Director/Founder Sophia Wong Boccio. Opening Night is Friday, September 8th, with the Japanese film “Yudo,” subtitled “The Way of the Bath,” directed by Masayuki Suzuki. For tickets and info, click Apuc 17.

The Asian Pop-Up Cinema (Apuc) will take place in Chicago between September 8th and October 7th, 2023, and for the first time will include film selections from Mongolia, Iran and Afghanistan, along with entries from Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, China and more. According to Sophia Wong Boccio, “Through the lenses of this season’s diversified filmmakers we are presenting a broad spectrum of films that are relevant and entertaining.”

Apuc Season 17, September 8th - October 7th, 2023

Photo credit: AsianPopUpCinema.org

This season’s special guests appearing on behalf of their films include Amarsaikhan Baljinnyham, Ben Yuen, Dornaz Hajiha, Lawrence Kan, Lee Won Suk,...

Chicago, Il – Asian Pop-Up Cinema (Apuc) announces its upcoming Season 17 lineup, running between September 8 and October 7 in Chicago. For the first time, this year's programming will include film selections from Mongolia, Iran and Afghanistan, along with entries from Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and more. This season's special guests attending with their films include Amarsaikhan Baljinnyham, Ben Yuen, Dornaz Hajiha, Lawrence Kan, Lee Won Suk, Ng Siu Hin, Park Dong-Hee, Rachel Leung, Roya Sadat and Wong You Nam. South Korean actor Lee Sun-Kyun will be Apuc's Excellent Achievement in Film Award recipient and will receive his award before the feature presentation of closing night film Killing Romance.

Apuc's Season 17 opens with a screening of director Masayuki Suzuki's Yudo, following architect Shiro Miura's (Toma Ikuta) attempts to modernize his outdated public bathhouse family business. As he immerses himself in the new role, Shiro connects with customers and begins to...

Season 17 (September 8 – October 7) kicks off with a screening of director Masayuki Suzuki's Yudo, architect Shiro Miura's (Toma Ikuta) and his return to his family-owned public bathhouse. Intent on modernizing the outdated establishment, Shiro faces unexpected challenges from both his brother Goro (Gaku Hamada) and a fire that lands him as the bathhouse's temporary manager. As he immerses himself in the role, Shiro connects with customers and begins to understand the happiness and democratizing power the place offers. The film will be presented at AMC Newcity 14, 1500 N. Clybourn, (September 8).

Centerpiece film Harvest Moon is Mongolian actor Amarsaikhan Baljinnyam's debut feature as director. An award-winning screenwriter, he adapted this father-son story from a short novel by T. Bum-Erden, following a city chef who must fulfill the harvesting in his village after his father dies. Representing Mongolia in the international feature 2022 Oscar submission, the film will be presented at AMC Newcity...

The traditional closing-night party saw revellers celebrating until breakfast.

Iranian director Dornaz Hajiha’s Like A Fish On The Moon won the Transilvania Trophy, the top prize of the international competition at the Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF) in Romania at a gala ceremony on Saturday June 17.

Hajiha’s debut feature premiered at in Karlovy Vary’s Proxima competition in 2022 and is being handled internationally by Hong Kong-based Asian Shadows It also picked up the best performance award for the lead actress Sepidar Tari ex aequo with Nacho Quesada, who plays the lead role in Andrew Sala’s France-Argentina film The Barbarians.

The traditional closing-night party saw revellers celebrating until breakfast.

Iranian director Dornaz Hajiha’s Like A Fish On The Moon won the Transilvania Trophy, the top prize of the international competition at the Transilvania International Film Festival (TIFF) in Romania at a gala ceremony on Saturday June 17.

Hajiha’s debut feature premiered at in Karlovy Vary’s Proxima competition in 2022 and is being handled internationally by Hong Kong-based Asian Shadows It also picked up the best performance award for the lead actress Sepidar Tari ex aequo with Nacho Quesada, who plays the lead role in Andrew Sala’s France-Argentina film The Barbarians.

Like a Fish on the Moon, the feature debut of Iranian writer-director Dornaz Hajiha, has won the Transilvania Trophy for best feature film at this year’s festival, marking the first time in the event’s 22-year history that Transilvania International Film Festival’s top award went to a female director.

The film follows new parents who are forced to adapt when their apparently healthy son suddenly stops talking.

“The film we have chosen impressed us for the originality of its premise, the power of its performances and the intelligence with which it explored very difficult subject matter,” Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco, the jury president, said in a statement. “The director demonstrated great attention to detail and an impressive, singular vision. We were also impressed by the script, which captured the often conflicting pressures of parenthood, the brutality of devotion. It is a film that resonated long after it ended.

Iranian filmmaker Dornaz Hajiha took home the top prize Saturday at the Transilvania Film Festival, as the jury awarded the first-time director with the Transilvania Trophy for “Like a Fish on the Moon,” a moving family drama about two parents coping with the emotional fallout when their young son suddenly stops talking.

In the jury’s citation, Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco highlighted “the originality of its premise, the power of its performances, and the intelligence with which it explored very difficult subject matter,” describing “Like a Fish on the Moon” as “a film that resonated long after it ended.”

Hajiha was visibly moved as she took the stage to accept the award, which was presented to her by Transilvania Lifetime Achievement Award winner Geoffrey Rush moments after the Australian actor delivered an impassioned and at times whimsical tribute to the power of cinema.

“It’s such an honor to get...

The 22nd edition of the Transilvania International Film Festival kicked off Friday night in the city of Cluj-Napoca with the international premiere of Northern Comfort, a comedy directed by Icelandic filmmaker Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson, and with a tribute to the film’s star, Timothy Spall.

The famed British character actor, known for his roles in Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy and Mr. Turner, Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai, Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech and the Harry Potter films, received this year’s lifetime achievement award at the festival’s opening gala.

The Icelandic-uk-German co-production Northern Comfort is part of the massive Nordic Focus at the festival this year, with more than 40 films from Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Finland and Sweden, as well as live music performances and cine-concerts. Some of the Nordic highlights include Ruben Östlund’s 2022 Palm d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness, Lars von Trier...

The Romanian film festival runs June 9-18.

Transilvania International Film Festival has announced the line-up for its 22nd edition which takes place in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

The official competition is made up of 12 features while the documentary strand, entitled What’s Up Doc?, will screen 10 titles. All of the films are from first and second-time directors.

Among the competition selection is Ion Bors’ Carbon which premiered in San Sebastian’s New Directors strand last year, having won the festival’s Wip Europa Industry and Wip Europa awards the previous year. The dark comedy, surrounding the Transnistrian conflict of the 1990s, is...

Further winners include ‘Gaspar’ from Indonesia and ‘Sima’s Song’ from Afghan director Roya Sadat.

Myanmar project Future Laobans, directed by Maung Sun and produced by jailed filmmaker Ma Aeint, won the Busan Award at the Asian Project Market today (October 11).

The project picked up the 15,000 cash prize in Busan. Currently in script development, Future Laobans is about three young scavengers in Myanmar who smuggle a jade stone across the border with dreams of becoming millionaires.

Filmmaker Ma Aeint was jailed in Myanmar in April on charges of anti-junta activity and is serving a three-year sentence. She was mentioned as...

“Future Laobans,” a project directed by Maung Sun and produced by Maung Sun and Ma Aeint claimed the Busan Prize, the top award at the Asian Project Market, on Tuesday.

The awards were made at an event held at the Paradise Hotel in Busan’s Haeundae district at the end of three days of quick-fire meetings between producers and directors and an array of potential co-producers, financiers and distributors. Organizers said that they put together 705 such one-on-one meetings on the sidelines of the Busan International Film Festival.

Ma Aeint had not been able to take part in meetings at the Apm or participate in the closing ceremony as she is a political prisoner, currently in prison in Myanmar. She has currently served roughly one and ahalf years of a three-year sentence.

Unable to make a speech at the closing ceremony Maung Sun told Variety: “I’m making this film for her.

Projects selected from 15 countries.

South Korea’s Busan International Film Festival (Biff) has unveiled the 29 titles selected for the 2022 Asian Project Market (Apm).

The film financing event that runs as part of Biff’s Asian Contents and Film Market will return in-person from October 9-11, after taking place as a hybrid event last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

From this year, Apm has excluded non-Asian projects to provide more focused support for Asian projects, which must be submitted by directors who have made at least one short or full-length feature as well as producers who have been involved with at least one feature.

Busan International Film Festival (Biff) has announced the 29 projects selected for this year’s Asian Project Market (Apm), a core strand of the festival’s industry activities, including new works from Thailand’s Aditya Assarat, China’s Wang Qi, Vietnam’s Le Bao and Myanmar’s Maung Sun, whose producer Ma Aeint is currently in prison in Yangon.

Ma Aeint, who previously produced Maung Sun’s award-winning Money Has Four Legs, was recently sentenced to three years in jail with hard labor by Myanmar’s military junta, which took over the country in a brutal coup in early 2021. She was accused of “causing fear, spreading fake news or agitating against government employees”. She is attached as a producer to Maung Sun’s new project, Future Laobans, described as a drama about the “international dimension of organized crime.”

Assarat, an award-winning Thai director, is returning to feature-length directing after focusing on producing,...

Family is the hotbed for many things, positive and negative, usually negative. One problem might multiply and make the situations escalate quickly. One such Iranian family stands in the focus of the film “Like a Fish on the Moon” written and directed by the up and coming filmmaker Dornaz Hajiha. The film premiered at the newly established Proxima competition at Karlovy Vary.

We know that something is wrong in the seemingly idyllic lives of Haleh (Sepidar Tari) and Amir (Shahdyar Shakiba) right from the very start, and we know what the problem is exactly: their son Ilya (Ali Ahmadi) has stopped talking suddenly and apparently for no reason. Other than that, their lives seem perfectly normal for members of the middle class in the urban areas of Iran. They both work, they have a place to live and a car to drive and Ilya has toys and video-games to play with.

Geoffrey Rush and Benicio Del Toro will receive special awards at the 2022 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Kviff organizers announced on Tuesday. The two actors will both receive their awards during the closing ceremony on July 9 in the festival’s namesake spa town outside Prague in the Czech Republic.

Rush will receive the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema, an award that in the past has gone to Michael Caine, Julianne Moore, Jude Law and Judi Dench. Three of Rush’s films – “The King’s Speech,” “Quills” and “Shine,” for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor – will be screened at the festival.

Del Toro will receive the President’s Award for making “a fundamental contribution to the development of film and cinema.” “The Usual Suspects” and his Oscar-winning turn in “Traffic” will be screened for the occasion. Ethan Hawke received the President’s Award last year.

Film festival unveils 27 world premieres and three international premieres.

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Kviff) has announced the line-up of 33 features for its 56th edition, which includes Jake Paltrow’s Ukraine-shot Adolf Eichmann feature June Zero.

The Czech festival will take place from July 1-9 and the selection includes 27 world premieres, three international premieres and three European premieres.

Scroll down for full list of titles

The 12 titles in the Crystal Globe Competition are all world premieres, with the exception of Anna Kazejak’s Fucking Bornholm; Sophie Linnenbaum’s The Ordinaries; and Jonás Trueba’s You Have To Come And See It – all international premieres.

The Hong-Kong based sales company pick up rights to two family dramas

Hong Kong-based sales company Asian Shadows has picked up international rights to Iranian feature Like A Fish On The Moon, by debut director Dornaz Hajiha, and Adasqaq, by first-time Kazakh filmmaker Elzat Eskendir.

Like A Fish On The Moon is about a couple whose must learn to adapt when their young son suddenly stops talking. It is produced by renowned Iranian producer Ehsan Rasoulof.

Hajiah, who studied at the London Film School, is now developing her second feature Diaphanous, which is being produced by Chinese Shadows. It won...

Pia Borg’s ‘Michelle Remembers’ and Lucrecia Martel’s ‘Chocobar’ among those to win awards.

Pia Borg’s “documentary horror” Michelle Remembers was among a raft of winners at TorinoFilmLab’s annual Meeting Event, which shifted entirely online this year due to the pandemic.

The co-production forum, which usually takes place in the Italian city of Turin, virtually awarded its prizes this evening, marking the end of the five-day event that ran November 16-20.

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The first of two €50,000 Tfl production awards, funded by Creative Europe, went to Michelle Remembers, a documentary exploring the...

Selection includes the upcoming drama from Berlinale award-winner Radu Jude.

CineMart, the co-production market of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Iffr), has revealed the 17 feature projects to be showcased at next year’s edition.

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Held January 26-29 during the festival (which runs January 22 – February 2), CineMart invites filmmakers to pitch their projects to a host of international film professionals in tailored one-to-one meetings, as well as presentations that are open to all CineMart guests.

Notable directors in the selection include Romania’s Radu Jude, who won a Berlinale Silver Bear in 2015 with Aferim! and picked up...