Pinoy film wins award in Pusan filmfest

A multi-awarded Filipino film about the lives of four men in Manila has won yet another award in one of Asia's leading film festivals Friday. The Giuseppe Bede Sampedro production "Astig" (“Squalor") got a special mention in the Pusan International Film Festival held at Busan in South Korea, a report by The Associated Press said. "Astig," a word that can mean “tough" or “awesome" in Tagalog street parlance, is an episodic tale that traces the lives of four men as they interweave their lives with Manila’s urban setting. The film previously won four awards in this year’s Cinemalaya Film Festival including Best Director and Best Editing. [See: Film review: Astig] An Iraqi-Japanese film and a South Korean film, meanwhile, won the top prize during Friday’s awards night. The Pusan International Film Festival's $60,000 New Currents award for young Asian filmmakers went to Shawkat Amin Korki's "Kick Off" and So Sang-min's "I'm in Trouble," organizers said in a statement on the last day of the nine-day festival. The festival always names two films as winners. “Kick Off" is a film about Kurdish refugees living in a dilapidated football stadium in Kirkuk City during Saddam Hussein’s rule. The jury, chaired by French director Jean-Jacques Beineix, said it enjoyed Korki's "realistic, unexpected and poetic, almost surrealistic, vision to depict the precarious and hard life of a Kurdish Iraqi community that takes refuge in a football stadium." So Sang-min’s “I’m in Trouble," meanwhile, follows the life of a young poet’s messy relationships. The jurors were impressed by the director’s ability to "define his characters, control his story into very well elaborated long takes, which gives the movie a special tone." The other jurors were Turkish director Yesim Ustaoglu, Thai filmmaker Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Taiwanese actress Terri Kwan and South Korean cinematographer Kim Hyung-koo. The new $20,000 Flash Forward award for young, non-Asian directors went to Zaida Bergroth's German-Finnish family drama "Last Cowboy Standing." Norwegian-Taiwanese director Hakon Liu's "Miss Kicki," about a young Western man who visits his father's home Taiwan, won special mention. – Andreo C. Calonzo, GMANews.TV