Melbourne: Six Indian films have bagged eight major nominations in the 10th edition of Asia Pacific Screen awards this year.
Bollywood thriller “Psycho Raman,” directed by Anurag Kashyap and starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui has been nominated in three categories including best actor, achievement in cinematography and achievement in directing.
In the best performance by an actor category, Nawazuddin is up against Manoj Bajpayee for “Aligarh,” Dev Patel for “Lion,” Farhad Aslani for “Daughter” and Korean superstar Song Kang-ho, who is nominated for “The Throne”.
In the category of best screenplay, two Indian films — Leena Yadav’s “Parched” and Supratik Sen and Gurvinder Singh’s “The Fourth Direction”– are nominated.
The Asia Pacific Screen awards is said to be the region’s highest accolade in film which recognizes and promotes cinematic excellence and cultural diversity of the world’s fastest growing film region comprising 70 countries.
Vying for best feature film are Mustafa Kara’s richly symbolic Northern Turkish tale “Cold of Kalandar,” Reza Mirkarimi’s “Daughter” , Zeki Demirkubuz’ slow-burn psychological drama “Ember,” Kirill Serebrennikov’s “The Student” and passion project by Iranian master Majid Majidi, “Muhammad: the Messenger of God.”
APSA Film Director and member of the APSA International Nominations Council Maxine Williamson said “It has been a privilege and an honour to establish this Awards competition and see it grown in strength from year to year. How fitting that we have, in our 10th year, the strongest competition to date.”
The winners will be announced on November 24th this year in Brisbane.
This year’s nominees for the APSA Cultural Diversity Award, under the Patronage of UNESCO, are Dmitrii Davydov for “The Bonfire”, Hussein Hassan for “The Dark Wind”, Mustafa Kara for “Cold of Kalandar” , Tamer El Said for “In the Last Days of the City” and Wang Xuebo for “Knife in the Clear Water”.
This edition saw a record number of films in the competition with over 300 films from 43 countries and areas of Asia Pacific.
Chair of the APSA International Nominations Council, Professor Hong-Joon Kim said “The 10th APSA Competition has been a unique year in terms of the level of diversity amongst the films.
“In watching the 135 films in the feature narrative competition we saw diversity of everything commercial vs arthouse films, big industry vs small independent films, different nations and countries representing the major film producing nations, and the developing screen culture from countries with young film industries.
PTI