Pinoy film "Astig" cited in Pusan Int'l Film Fest

CEBU, Philippines - Giuseppe Bede Sampedro’s Philippine production “Squalor,” (locally titled as “Astig”) received a special mention in the New Currents Section of the recently-concluded 14th Pusan International Film Festival in Busan, South Korea.

“Astig,” starring actors Dennis Trillo, Sid Lucero, Edgar Allan Guzman, Arnold Reyes, is an episodic tale of four young men whose stories parallel and contrast with the landmarks and contemporary images of the slums of Manila.

The Agence France Presse earlier reporter that the word around PIFF this year was that “Squalor” could well walk away with the festival’s premiere prize.

It was an Iraqi-Japanese film about Kurdish refugees living in a dilapidated football stadium during Saddam Hussein’s rule as well as a South Korean movie that follows a young poet’s messy relationships, however, that won the top prizes at what has been touted as one of Asia’s leading film festivals.

The $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 Friday, the last day of the nine-day festival. The festival always names two films as winners.

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.”

The jurors said they were impressed by So’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. With AP reports