South Korean festival selects Iran’s Mirkarimi as jury president
TEHRAN –(Iranart)-Iranian auteur Reza Mirkarmi was appointed to preside over the jury members of the Kim Jiseok Award section of the 26th Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) in South Korea.
the other jury members of this section are Gulnara Abikeyeva, professor and film critic from Kazakhstan, and Kim Haery, a film critic and the current editor-in-chief of the film magazine CINE21.
BIFF 2021’s jury members of three sections, Kim Jiseok, BIFF Mecenat, and Sonje Awards, will be responsible for selecting emerging directors to lead the future of Asian cinema and the best cinematic works throughout Asia.
The festival will be held for ten days from October 6 to 15.
The Iranian filmmaker has previously been a member of the panel of jury for the 16th Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival, the 30th Tokyo International Film Festival, the 12th Eurasia International Film Festival in Kazakhstan, and the 15th Tbilisi International Film Festival.
Mirkarimi was also the director of the 34th and 35th Fajr International Film Festival (FIff).
Mirkarimi has participated in Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF) several times and won the Golden St. George for his ‘As Simply as That’ and won Critics’ Awards as well. His ‘Under the Moonlight,’ ‘A Cube of Sugar,’ and ‘Farthest and Nearest’ (dubbed in Russian) has been screened in a tour of Russian cities, with ‘A Cube of Sugar’ crowned in the Kazan Festival for Best Cinematography and Best Actress awards.
His film ‘Daughter’ won the Main Prize ‘Golden George’ for Best Film, ‘Silver George’ for Best Actor (Farhad Aslani) and the Second Audience Award for Best Film at the 38th MIFF.
In 2000, his second feature, ‘Under the Moonlight,’ won the Best Feature Award of the 40th Critics’ Week at 2001 Cannes International Film Festival. The film also won the Best Director’s Award as well as the Special Jury Prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival in 2001.
Two of his films, ‘So Close, So Far’ (2005) and ‘Today’ (2014), were entries for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.
Mirkarimi’s ‘Castle of Dreams,’ won a 100,000-Turkish lira award for Best Director, while its lead actor, Hamed Behdad, shared the Best Actor award of the International Feature Film Competition section of the 56th Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival in Turkey, the Best Actor Award, Best Director Award, and the Golden Goblet at the Shanghai International Film Festival.
The film has also won two awards at the Batumi International Art-House Film Festival in Georgia, Best Film in the West and East Eurasian Film Festival (Orenburg, Russia) and Best Director award at the fourth Slemani International Film Festival in Iraq.
The Kim Jiseok Award of the Busan festival was established in 2017 to commemorate the spirit of the late BIFF program director, Kim Jiseok, who was dedicated to the discovery of and support for new directors as well as to the growth of Asian cinema. Among the world premieres directed by renowned Asian directors, two films are selected and each director is awarded $10,000, wrote biff.kr.
The BIFF Mecenat Award jury consists of director Wang Nanfu, who gained worldwide recognition for her film, ‘Hooligan Sparrow’ (2016), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2017, director Kelvin Kyung Kun Park, who is a visual artist and was a recipient of the BIFF Mecenat Award in 2018, with his film, ‘Army,’ and Mandy Marahimin, who endeavors to commercialize Indonesian and Southeast Asian documentaries.
Also on the Sonje Award jury are: Bastian Meiresonne, who is actively participating in various international film festivals as an Asian cinema consultant and organizer; Royston Tan, a Singaporean director whose name was on Time Magazine’s “Top 20 Asian Heroes” list in 2004; and Yoon Danbi, who won four awards at BIFF 2019 with her feature debut, ‘Moving On’ (2019).
Source: Iran Daily